Multidimensional (MD) Circuits and Systems for Emerging Applications Including Cognitive Radio, Radio Astronomy, Robot Vision and Imaging

摘要

Advances in the performance of VLsi circuits are leadingr to a number of emerging applications of multidimensionalr (md) filters. Early progress was focused on the numericalr design of two dimensional (2-d) transfer functions and ther challenging stability issues associated with low-complexityr infinite impulse response (iir) implementations. However,r over the last decade or so, important practical advancesr have occurred in the design of 3-d and 4-d iir filters, leadingr to some important emerging applications. in this tutorialr article, some of these applications are described, withr emphasis on 2-d spatio-temporal beamforming and 4-dr light field processing. in particular, advances in spatio-temporalr beamforming for cognitive radio systems and for syntheticr aperture radio telescopes are considered. in the 4-dr case, we describe a class of 4-d light field filters for imager processing, 4-d hyper-fan filters for low-light imaging,r depth filtering, denoising and the attenuation of distractingr objects, with applications in computational photographyr and habitat monitoring. Both analog and digital systolicr VLsi circuit implementations are described with emphasisr on recent progress using field programmable gate arrayr (fPgA)-based and digital VLsi circuits that can potentiallyr operate at radio frequencies in the multi-gHz range. theser new innovations open up exciting possibilities for real-timer md filters having frames rates in the multi-gHz for emergingr radio frequency (rf) antenna signal processing andr imaging systems.