FPGA technology in instrumentation and related tools

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) have become an alternative to traditional Digital Signal Processors (DSP) in many applications. In some cases, where high throughput is the main concern, an FPGA-based system may in fact be the only solution to fulfill the requirements. In the area of particle accelerators, FPGAs are used in many contexts, ranging from digital feedback loops for power converters and RF cavities to Digital Signal Processing for beam instrumentation. These designs harness the vast amount of logic resources inside FPGA chips to deliver unprecedented performance through parallelism and pipelining. After an introduction to the internal architecture of FPGAs and the design process, including advanced issues such as floor planning, we look at two important techniques to implement arithmetic in FPGAs: Distributed Arithmetic (DA) and the Coordinate Rotation DIgital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm. The goal is not to exhaust the list of Digital Signal Processing techniques for FPGAs, but rather to illustrate ways in which FPGAs are used to maximize performance.