A new systolic multiprocessor architecture for real-time soft tomography algorithms

• A fixed-point reconfigurable systolic VLSI hardware architecture for real-time ECT.
• Up to 8.475 Kframes/sec a throughput for the Landweber algorithm could be achieved.
• The suggested architecture satisfies the real-time requirements of several applications.

In this paper, a new systolic multiprocessor architecture for soft tomography algorithms that explores the intrinsic parallelisms and hardware resources which are available in recent Field Programmable Gate Arrays architectures is presented. The soft tomography algorithms such as Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT), Magnetic Inductance Tomography (MIT), and Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), while they use different sensors and data acquisition modules, they feature common computation requirements which consist of intensive matrix multiplications and fast/frequent memory accesses. Using the variable bit-width and fixed-point multipliers array available in the DSP blocks, which cooperatively perform the partial matrix product with associated Arithmetic and Logic Units (ALU), and distributed memory available in Stratix V FPGA, a dedicated scalable architecture is suggested to host the Landweber algorithm. The experimental results indicate that 16,949 frames of (32 × 32 pixels) can be reconstructed in one second if each element of the matrix is attributed to 18 bits and using a clock frequency of 400 MHz. This is more than enough in most process imaging applications. In addition, the accuracy of the image reconstruction using 18 bits/operand is found to be acceptable since it exceeds 86%. More accuracy can be achieved up to 99% if 36 bits/operand are used which leads to an image reconstruction throughput of 1272 frames /s (for image size 32 × 32).