Document Type: Instrumentation Newsletter NI Supported: Yes Publish Date: Feb 10, 2012

Make Your Measurements Faster With FPGA Technology

Table of Contents 1. Host-Based Implementation of an FFT 2. FPGA-Based Implementation of an FFT 3. Further Improvements Using FPGAs FPGAs increase performance while providing real-time measurements. In the mobile phone manufacturing world, time is invaluable. The longer it takes to test each device, the later they get to market and the higher the costs. Spectral measurements such as adjacent channel leakage ratio (ACLR) tend to be the most demanding measurements on instrument performance and speed. Modern spectrum analyzers implement ACLR measurements through the fast Fourier transform (FFT), long known as the quickest method of converting time domain data into the frequency domain. But even with efficient implementations, a software-based FFT calculation can dominate measurement time. To improve RF performance and increase repeatability for these demanding frequency domain measurements, RF test engineers often average multiple measurements. Host-Based Implementation of an FFT Spectrum analyzers have come a long way from the purely analog swept-source instruments of the past. They now include vector acquisition capabilities, fast-tuning oscillators, high-performance A/D converters, and high-bandwidth digital buses such as PXI Express for data movement. These features make quicker measurements possible and they also offer the ability to take advantage of the fastest PC microprocessors, including multicore technology, which you can use to implement your measurements in software. This approach, known as virtual instrumentation, has become the standard for the highest performance automated test systems. Such advances in computation ability greatly benefit complex measurements like ACLR. FPGA-Based Implementation of an FFT To increase performance even further, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer the computational performance to provide real-time measurementsthose that occur faster than the time it takes to acquire the data. NI FlexRIO FPGA modules offer high-performance Xilinx Virtex-class FPGAs that you can program with NI LabVIEW system design software. They also have the ability to transfer data over PXI Express using peer-to-peer data streaming technology at rates up to 800 MB/s. By coupling them with NI modular instruments, such as the 14 GHz NI PXIe-5665 vector signal analyzer (VSA), you can continuously stream up to 50 MHz of real-time RF bandwidth to an NI FlexRIO FPGA module for processing. When migrating a measurement algorithm to an FPGA, you can gain the maximum benefit for the lowest investment if you focus on the computations most amenable to FPGA acceleration. For ACLR, this includes the FFT and running sum. The LabVIEW FPGA code in Figure 1 shows the key computations for an ACLR measurement. VSA data arrives on the FPGA from a peer-to-peer first in, first out (FIFO) buffer, which is configured from the host. Since a wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) ACLR measurement does not require any specific triggering, you can immediately apply consecutive time domain windows to reduce spectral leakage in the subsequent FFT. After the FFT, you maintain a running sum of the magnitude of each bin. Once you have obtained the specified number of accumulations, you can use DMA to transfer the resulting data to the host for normalization (division by the number of sums), power calculation in each band, conversion into dB, and the appropriate ACLR calculations.

Figure 1. Express VIs for common signal processing operations greatly simplify programming for high-performance FPGA applications. Figure 2 features the same ACLR measurement on a host PC and an FPGA. For these benchmarks, a length-4096 window, an FFT, and an accumulation interval are used to achieve a resolution bandwidth of less than 10 kHz with 25 MHz of analysis bandwidth. While the host-based implementation takes advantage of multiple high-performance CPU cores and the high-bandwidth PXI Express data bus, the FPGA implementation reduces measurement time even further by using dedicated, real-time processing and eliminating unnecessary host data transfers. Furthermore, the peer-to-peer FIFO is configured only once regardless of the number of averages, so measurement time scales based on the amount of time you need to acquire the RF data necessary to perform the measurement. To achieve optimum repeatability, test engineers often perform a larger number of averages. For example, 100 averages provide a standard deviation of 0.069 dBc. As the number of averages increases, so does the processing burden on the host FPGA. When you implement FFTs and a larger number of averages, you notice a greater benefit than when performing the same process on the host.

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Figure 2. While a host-based measurement provides very high performance, running the same calculations on an FPGA is considerably faster. Further Improvements Using FPGAs FPGA processing advantages extend beyond spectral measurements. To make testing even faster and more flexible, you can implement a variety of other tests and algorithms on the FPGA such as time domain averaging, occupied bandwidth, and custom frequency triggering. The implementation of cellular measurements in the LabVIEW FPGA Module extends LabVIEW and PXI core benefits such as parallelism and peer-to-peer streaming for faster, more reliable, and more flexible test architectures. Raajit Lall Raajit Lall is a product marketing manager for RF and wireless test at National Instruments. He earned his bachelors degree in computer and electrical engineering at Texas A&M University. Ryan Verret Ryan Verret is a senior product marketing manager for NI PXI FPGA-enabled products, including NI FlexRIO, and NI reconfigurable transceivers. His focus lies in digital signal processing, measurement algorithms, high-speed data movement, and FPGA system architectures. He earned both his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering at Rice University. Learn more about the NI PXIe-5665 architecture. This article first appeared in the Q1 2012 issue of Instrumentation Newsletter.

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