A new word-parallel CORDIC processor for ultrasonic imaging applications

The CORDIC algorithm is an iterative method for the efficient computation of vector rotations and several other trigonometric and hyperbolic functions. We have developed a fast, redundant, constant-scale factor, word-parallel implementation of a CORDIC algorithm to rotate ultrasonic signal vectors. The implementation is an improvement of a similar 1996 algorithm known as the differential CORDIC. The CORDIC processor is a part of an ultrasonic imaging system under development and has been implemented using logic synthesis of VHDL descriptions on a Xilinx Virtex 800 FPGA. The results of simulation and testing of the CORDIC rotator using a novel VHDL testbench have been presented. The error resulting from truncations is well within the expected limit.