A Design of CORDIC-based Magnetic Resonance RF Pulse Generator

In nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) systems, the radio frequency (RF) pulse generator critically influences imaging quality. Traditional direct digital synthesis (DDS) techniques rely on large-capacity lookup tables to achieve high precision, which results in excessive consumption of on-chip block random access memory (BRAM) resources and limits flexibility. This study presents a novel RF pulse generator design based on the coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) algorithm. By integrating a custom CORDIC core within a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), the proposed system achieves digital modulation of RF signal’s frequency, phase, and amplitude. Combined with a Zynq-7000 system-on-chip (SoC), this design delivers a highly integrated and low-power hardware architecture. Experimental results demonstrate that the generator can output RF pulses with a frequency resolution of 0.046 Hz and a phase resolution of 0.005 5˚, while reducing BRAM resources occupied by four channels by approximately 21.4% compared to the traditional DDS solution. This design offers a feasible solution for achieving miniaturization and high performance in the RF front-end of NMR instruments.