A novel concept for adaptive signal processing on reconfigurable hardware

Abstract

Today, digital signal processing systems for applications like audio or video production are restricted as they do not exhaust the possibilities given by modern hardware. Reconfigurable hardware exploits a huge degree of parallelism and provides flexibility at an affordable energy budget, thus becoming a competitive alternative for high performance Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications, previously dominated by general purpose processing cores and Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs). This paper describes the design and evaluation of a novel concept for adaptive signal processing on reconfigurable hardware by using an adaptive reverberation algorithm targeting real time streams. Novel solutions were adopted in several critical parts of the signal processing chain in order to achieve a high level of accuracy under real time constraints. Experimental results show the efficiency of the introduced implementation on a Virtex-7 FPGA, as we can provide reality accurate reverberation with ultra low latency of ∼ 20.8 μs.