A Real-Time Edge Accelerator for Coherent Doppler Wind Lidars

The current work presents an Edge Computing hardware accelerator for real-time signal processing in Coherent Doppler Wind Lidars (CDWLs). CDWLs require high-sampling rates that exceed 7 Gbit/s in data throughput for distances above 7.5 km, considering the raw and the accumulated data for noise suppression. The proposed solution exploits a reconfigurable hardware accelerator (Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU102 FPGA) that instantiates 16 parallel processing chains estimating in real-time the wind Doppler shift. The deployed system traces wind speed in 2-digit precision up to 9.99 km range with a spatial resolution of 39.03 m. The hardware accelerator is operating at 245.76 MHz, attaining a processing throughput of 41.94 Gbit/s and utilizing 80210 LUTs, 553 BRAMs and 640 DSPs.