Acceleration of Electromagnetic Simulations on Reconfigurable FPGA Card

T. Topa, A. Noga (Silesian Univ. of Techn., Gliwice, Poland), T. Stefanski (Gdansk Univ. of Techn., Poland)

In this contribution, the hardware acceleration of electromagnetic simulations on the reconfigurable field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) card is presented. In the developed implementation of scientific computations, the matrix-assembly phase of the method of moments (MoM) is accelerated on the Xilinx Alveo U200 card. The computational method involves discretization of the frequency-domain mixed potential integral equation using the Rao-Wilton-Glisson basis functions and their extension to wire-to-surface junctions. Hardware resources in our FPGA card allow for synthesizing nine independent processing paths. The implementation is evaluated in a numerical test, which involves a simulation of radiation from a monopole antenna mounted on the roof of Dodge Shelby Charger car. Results show that the developed acceleration is 9.49x faster than a traditional (i.e., serial) central processing unit (CPU) MoM implementation, and about 1.66x faster than a parallel six-core CPU MoM implementation. However, in the considered numerical benchmark, the execution of the same computations on the hybrid CPU/FPGA platform reduces the power consumption 2.1x in comparison with the multicore implementation, hence, it allows for the reduction of environmental effects of scientific computing.