Hardware implementation of multiresolution filtering for broadband instrumentation
Stephen W. Kercel, W.B. Dress · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1995
The authors have constructed a wavelet processing board that implements a 14-level wavelet transform. The board uses a high-speed analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, a hardware queue, and five fixed-point digital signal processing (DSP) chips in a parallel pipeline architecture. All five processors are independently programmable. The board is designed as a general purpose engine for instrumentation applications requiring near real-time wavelet processing or multiscale filtering. The present application is the processing engine of a magnetic field monitor that covers 305 Hz through 5 MHz. The monitor is used for the detection of peak values of magnetic fields in nuclear power plants. This paper describes the design, development, simulation, and testing of the system. Specific issues include the conditioning of real-world signals for wavelet processing, practical trade-offs between queue length and filter length, selection of filter coefficients, simulation of a 14-octave filter bank, and limitations imposed by a fixed-point processor. Test results from the completed wavelet board are included.