Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Abstract

On today's modern battlefield, the ability to adapt is critical. The asymmetric threats that we now face require that we have the ability to evolve and field new technology quickly and reliably. The Kalman filter is an important algorithm often used in target tracking applications to estimate the future behavior of a system based on a series of past behaviors. There exists an urgent need to provide a flexible Kalman filter implementation in a portable yet synthesizable design. A one dimensional Kalman Filter algorithm provided in Matlab is used as the basis for the Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) model. The JAVA programming language is used to create the VHDL code that describes the Kalman filter in hardware which allows for maximum flexibility. The internal parameters of the filter such as process noise covariance, measurement noise covariance, data width, and data shape can be adjusted to achieve an optimal design to fit any requirement.