Soft-Hard 3D FD-TD solver for non destructive evaluation

Modeling of physical phenomena often involves the use of complex sets of equations whose computational solution has demanding requirements in terms of memory and computing power. Finite-difference time-domain (FD-TD) method is a technique widely used nowadays in a variety of areas, such as antennas design, medical studies, circuit packaging and non destructive evaluation (NDE), having the advantage of a feasible hardware implementation of the algorithm that can significantly speedup the computations. In this paper we will focus on the thermal modeling of the soil for NDE. To this aim we projected a true 3D FD-TD model of the soil on an FPGA. Two different implementations of the system were made, one developed with VHDL and another one with Handel-C. A speed-up factor of 160 over a PC is achieved which shows the utility of such an implementation.

keywords: Algorithm design and analysis, Circuits, Equations, Field programmable gate arrays, Finite difference methods, Hardware, Packaging, Physics computing, Soil, Time domain analysis, VHDL, FPGA