Hardware Acceleration of MUSIC Algorithm for Sparse Arrays and Uniform Linear Arrays

Multiple Signal Classification (MUSIC) is a high-performance Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation algorithm, which has been widely used. The algorithm needs to calculate the covariance matrix, eigenvalue decomposition and spectral peak search. In the paper, the hardware structure of the existing Jacobi algorithm for Hermitian matrices is proposed. On this basis, a novel hardware acceleration of the MUSIC algorithm for sparse arrays and uniform linear arrays is proposed, and the sparse array is a nested array. There are two designs, Design 1 supports 110 nested array elements or 132 uniform linear array elements, distinguishes 132 sources, configures snapshots 12048, and the maximum number of iterations and iteration accuracy of the complex Jacobi algorithm. Design 2 only needs 101.8μ s to complete a DOA estimation when the number of array elements is 8, the number of sources is 1, and the snapshots is 128. In more detail, the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of both can reach 0.03°. The logic resources on the Zynq-7000 development board are 14,761 and 28,305 Look-Up Tables (LUTs), respectively.