Accelerating the Finite Element Method Using FPGA for Electromagnetic Field Computation

Understanding and predicting electromagnetic behavior is very important in electrical engineering field. The finite element method (FEM) is a powerful tool for the electromagnetic phenomena. However, the FEM in electromagnetic problems is computationally intensive, which can run for a few hours to several days in lager scale problems. Thus, accelerating FEM is one of the most significant works. The Jacobi iterative method is the technique widely used for solving linear equations that is the most time-consuming step in FEM. In this paper, a hardware Jacobi solver is designed and implemented using a pipelined architecture and fine-grained parallelism. The hardware solver is applied to the electromagnetic boundary value problem (BVP) to verify the implementation and explore the hardware speed and cost.