Design and implementation of a wavelet block for signal processing applications

FPGA technology offers the potential of designing high performance systems at low cost for certain applications including signal processing. Although the programming model, which FPGAs typically present to application developers, is prohibitively low level, they remain very good targets for rapid design prototyping and on chip testing. The purpose of this paper is to present the design and FPGA implementation of a wavelet block which can be used in signal processing applications. The proposed design is based on a structure, which can be used to implement either a forward wavelet transform or alternatively its inverse. Finally, in order to assess the approach a wavelet prototype is implemented and the implementation results are reported and discussed.