Project Ideas

• Computing
  • John Conway's game of life or other cellular automata
  • AppleII or PDP8 or PDP11 or TRS80 or other computer emulator
  • FPGApple
  • RetroMicro
  • Transputers, parallelism, and graphics
  • FPGA IMPLEMENTATION OF UNIVERSAL RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR
  • SHA1 cracker and NSA@home
  • FPGA-based encryption
  • Connection Machine
  • Wide word machine
  • Cellular Automata
• Games/Graphics/Physics
  • Graphics accelerator
  • Accelerating the bidirectional path tracing algorithm using a dedicated intersection processor
  • RPU: A Programmable Ray Processing Unit for Realtime Ray Tracing
  • FPGA ray tracer and another
  • Game dynamics accelerator (physics engine)
  • Particle systems
  • Generate a full NTSC composite color signal, for a video game. NTSC spreadsheet, black and white,
  • PostScript rendering with virtual hardware
  • An FPGA move generator for the game of chess, Boule M, Zilic Z
    ICGA JOURNAL 25 (2): 85-94 JUN 2002
    http://www.macs.ece.mcgill.ca/~mboul/CICCpaper.pdf
  • Usage of a reconfigurable computer to simulate multiparticle systems ; Fragner H (Fragner, Heinrich)
    COMPUTER PHYSICS COMMUNICATIONS 176 (5): 327-333 MAR 1 2007
    http://www.fragner.org/hf_cpc_2006.pdf
  • FPGA Arcade
  • FPGA Console
  • Fractals - Mandelbrot set, Julia set, Fractal Gallery, Fractal Geometry
  • Fractal landscapes
• Instruments
  • Logic analyzer
  • Digital oscilloscope
  • Programmable signal generator
  • Complex impedance (Bode) plotter
• Audio Signal Processing
  • Audio special effects (distortion/reverb/flanger), perhaps with graphical patch panel.
  • Audio spectrogram to VGA
  • Muscial instrument simulation
    • Karplus-Strong string algorithm
    • Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.
    • Elementary Digital Waveguide Models for Vibrating Strings
    • Digital Audio Synthesis and Effects based on Physical Models by Julius O. Smith
    • PHYSICAL AUDIO SIGNAL PROCESSING
    • Digital Waveguide Synthesis
    • Banded waveguides
    • Theory of Banded Waveguides
      Essl, Georg, Serafin, Stefania, Cook, Perry R.,Smith, Julius O. (Julius Orion)
      Computer Music Journal, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2004
    • Musical Applications of Banded Waveguides
      Essl, Georg, Serafin, Stefania, Cook, Perry R.,Smith, Julius O. (Julius Orion)
      Computer Music Journal, Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2004
    • Physical modeling using digital waveguides
      Julius O. Smith, III
      Computer Music Journal, Vol. 16, No. 4. (Winter, 1992), pp. 74-91.
    • Digital Synthesis of Plucked-String and Drum Timbres
      Kevin Karplus; Alex Strong
      Computer Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Summer, 1983), pp. 43-55.
    • Extensions of the Karplus-Strong Plucked-String Algorithm,
      David A. Jaffe; Julius O. Smith
      Computer Music Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2. (Summer, 1983), pp. 56-69.
    • Acoustic Modeling Using the Digital Waveguide Mesh
      Damian Murphy; Antti Kelloniemi; Jack Mullen; Simon Shelley;
      Signal Processing Magazine, IEEE Volume 24, Issue 2, 2007 Page(s):55 - 66
    • Real-Time Dynamic Articulations in the 2-D Waveguide Mesh Vocal Tract Model
      Mullen, J.; Howard, D. M.; Murphy, D. T.;
      Audio, Speech and Language Processing, IEEE Transactions on
      Volume 15, Issue 2, Feb. 2007 Page(s):577 - 585
    • FPGA implementation of 1D wave equation for real-time audio synthesis Gibbons JA, Howard DM, Tyrrell AM
      IEE PROCEEDINGS-COMPUTERS AND DIGITAL TECHNIQUES 152 (5):619-631 SEP 2005
  • VR/surround-sound processor: move a sound around a listener
    • Headphone sound externalization
    • Spatial Sound, Data description, coordinate system
    • HRTF data
    • Demo clips: 1, 2, 3, 4 If these links break, search on: spatialization clips or 3D sound clips.
    • Another demo clip partly in German.
  • Real-Time Speech Pitch Shifting on an FPGA
  • Speech synthesis
  • Single Chip Implementation of the 1.6Kbps Speech Vocoder
  • Adaptive noise cancellation and 1, 2, and 3
  • Fractal music
• Image Processing
  • Haar wavelet based processor scheme for image coding with low circuit complexity
    Diaz FJ (Diaz, F. Javier), Buron AM (Buron, Angel M.), Solana JM (Solana, Jose M.)
    COMPUTERS & ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING 33 (2): 109-126 MAR 2007
  • FPGA-oriented HW/SW implementation of the MPEG-4 video decoder; Zemva A (Zemva, Andrej), Verderber M (Verderber, Matjaz) MICROPROCESSORS AND MICROSYSTEMS 31 (5): 313-325 AUG 1 2007
• Soft radio:
  • Davies
  • Altera
  • UniversalSoftwareRadioPeripheral
  • Gnu
  • EE Times
  • Chun IK, Kim BG, Park IC; A fully synthesizable Bluetooth baseband module for a system-on-a-chip
    ETRI JOURNAL 25 (5): 328-336 OCT 2003
• Robots
  • Neural net robot
  • Stereo vision
  • Lego mindstorms FPGA
  • A FPGA-based Behavioral Control System for a Mobile Robot
• Biology
  • Conductance-based neurons (pdf)
  • DDA page
  • FPGA Based Visual Prosthesis Device
  • Biology goes digital
  • BLAST on FPGA
  • Hidden markov models
  • Hardware Evolution and an evolved fpga circuit
  • Adrian Thompson evolved circuit

• Altera Design Contest winners (pdf)
• Columbia CS student projects 2005, 2004, 2006, 2007
• GaTech student projects (Hamblen)
• UCLA VHDL projects
• fpga4fun