Exploration of FPGA interconnect for the design of unconventional antennas
Abhay Tavaragiri, Jacob Couch, Peter Athanas · 2011
The programmable interconnection resources are one aspect that distinguishes FPGAs from other devices. The abundance of these resources in modern devices almost always assures us that the most complex design can be routed. This underutilized resource can be used for other unintendedpurposes. One such use, explored here, is to concatenate large networks together to form pseudo-equipotential geometric shapes. These shapes can thenbe evaluatedin terms of their abilitytoradiate(modulated)energyoffthechiptoanearby receiver. In this paper, an unconventional method of building such transmitters on an FPGA is proposed. Arbitrary shaped antennas are created using a unique flow involving an experimental router and binary images. An experiment setup is used to measure the performance of the antennas created.