An efficient FDTD algorithm based on FPGA

Masoud, Rehab; Kamel, Mahmoud; Abdelrazek, Mohamed Hussien; Hameed, Mohamed; Obayya, Salah; Yahia, Ashraf Shams Eldien

doi:10.21608/ejaps.2022.162945.1044

An efficient FDTD algorithm based on FPGA

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ Physics Department, Faculty of Science, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

² National Center for Research and Radiation Technology, Atomic Energy Authority, Cairo, Egypt

³ Mathematics and Engineering Physics Department, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt

⁴ Electronics and communication Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Mansoura University, Mansoura, Egypt

10.21608/ejaps.2022.162945.1044

Abstract

Designing and modelling of photonic devices using PC simulators take a long time to get
the optimum device structures. where a huge number of iterative simulations are required. So, high-speed computers are needed. A design for an FPGA-based finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulator is proposed to accelerate the simulation process where the FDTD method is a remarkably effective computational electromagnetic technique for modelling electromagnetic space. The proposed technique is tested using the analysis of two-dimensional photonic crystal bend structure. The proposed FPGA simulator is 130x faster than the MATLAB program implemented in a PC with a 2.6 GHz processor and 40G RAM. Where, the relative error between FPGA proposed simulator and the MATLAB program was 7.52%. In this study memory architecture, parallelism, pipelining and fixed-point arithmetic have been studied and optimized. Implementing this structure will significantly improve computational speed, allowing it to be used in a wide range of other computational electromagnetics domains.

Keywords