An efficient implementation of synthesis filter bank and digital spectrum processing on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA for onboard transparent processor

FPGA implementation of computation intensive signal processing algorithms for satellite onboard applications require careful considerations of FPGA resource utilization and power consumption. In this paper, we describe several strategies used for efficient implementation of the synthesis filter banks and digital spectrum processing modules on FPGA. Xilinx Virtex-5 series FPGA was chosen for implementation of design verification model. Even though FPGAs of this series have sufficiently large logic resources for most common applications, implementation of fairly large filter banks and spectrum processing requires innovative design of FPGA code, described in this paper to achieve required performance in speed & power consumption. The paper also reveals important concept of digital implementation of post synthesis spectrum processing to avoid intermediate frequency subsystems & combining it with synthesis filter bank implementation in the same FPGA. The described implementation methods provide savings in utilization of FPGA real estate, which is critical for use in onboard satellite applications.