A New Approach for Arbitrary Waveform Generation using FPGA and Orthogonal Functions

In this paper, a new approach for generating arbitrary digital waveforms using orthogonal functions and field programmable gate array (FPGA) is presented. The availability of high performance FPGAs and sophisticated design tools in the recent years has made it possible to realize computation-intensive parts of a design in very easy and cost-effective way. A custom defined arbitrary waveform is selected to demonstrate the proposed technique. This approach can be easily adapted for the generation of variety of other periodic waveforms. The target device used in this research is Virtex-4 (xc4vfx12-10sf363) FPGA. The maximum operating frequency for this design is 44.821 MHz and utilizes only 6% of total FPGA slices. The compact size of the circuit allows for more functionality to be integrated in the same chip