Implementing a Phase Screen Generator in Hardware

The computation time required for the modelling of wavefront distortions over finite aperture has always been an important issue for applications like prediction of performance of laser designators and simulation of infrared scenes in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we show that the computation performance of the best previous algorithm that models this phenomenon can be substantially improved using high performance reconfigurable computing through acceleration of the key computationally intensive steps of the algorithm on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Our best hardware implementation provides a overall speedup of more than 8 times the original algorithm.