Implementation of three-dimensional FPGA-based FDTD solvers: an architectural overview

Maxwell´s equations, which govern electromagnetic propagation, are a system of coupled, differential equations. As such, they can be represented in difference form, thus allowing their numerical solution. By implementing both the temporal and spatial derivatives of Maxwell´s equations in difference form, we arrive at one of the most common computational electromagnetic algorithms, the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method (Yee, 1966). In this technique, the region of interest is sampled to generate a grid of points, hereafter referred to as a mesh. The discretized form of Maxwell´s equations is then solved at each point in the mesh to determine the associated electromagnetic fields. In this extended abstract, we present an architecture that overcomes the previous limitations. We begin with a high-level description of the computational flow of this architecture.