Real-time implementation of an efficient correlator for complementary sets of four sequences applied to ultrasonic pulse compression systems

Complementary sequences are being employed to improve the results obtained in many sensorial systems where it is necessary to enhance the signal to noise ratio imposed by the environment. This improvement is achieved at the expense of increasing the computational complexity of the signal processing tasks. This work presents the hardware implementation of an efficient correlator for complementary sets of four sequences and its application to an ultrasonic pulse compression system. This implementation starts with a generic VHDL specification and then it is developed on an FPGA architecture. The achieved design can be adapted to different computational requirements, easily modifying its datapath and the length of the used sequences. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.