Adaptive microphone array beamforming for teleconferencing using VHDL and parallel architectures

This paper describes how the VHDL hardware description language can be used to aid the analysis, design and implementation of adaptive array beamformers for use in teleconferencing environments using parallel architectures. Beamformer models are often implemented in traditional programming languages such as C, Pascal and FORTRAN. This paper argues that VHDL provides a number of benefits to designers of such systems including improved vision of algorithm architecture, a faster design cycle and a more parallel and implementation-orientated design. The level of abstraction that VHDL gives is an important aid to overcoming the implementation problems associated with designing microphone array beamformers. The traditional view of VHDL as a tool for making implementations in silicon can thus be extended to view VHDL as a tool for thinking with, in some circumstances better than with conventional algorithmic computer languages.