A DFT Computation Method for the Real-Time Processing of Vibration Signals at FPGA Circuit Level

The paper proposes a DFT (Discret Fourier Transform) calculation method implemented in an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) circuit. The possibilities of parallel processing in the FPGA circuits generate new approaches for data processing. Normally, FFT processing needs all series of samples of a signal to evaluate the result. Due to the complexity and the large volume of computation, the time required for processing is significant. Thus, the acquisition time of a sequence of samples is summed with the processing time, which practically leads to an off-line processing, in relation to the moment of occurrence of an event in a process. The proposed method tries to obtain the result of the FFT processing in parallel with vibration signal acquisition. Thus, the processing is performed in real-time, at the acquisition speed of the vibration signal.