Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the Second Quarter 2012 issue of Xcell Journal, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of Xilinx .

Most engineers tasked with implementing a mathematical function such as sine, cosine or square root within an FPGA may initially think of doing so by means of a lookup table, possibly combined with linear interpolation or a power series if multipliers are available. However, in cases like this the CORDIC algorithm is one of the most important tools in your arsenal, albeit one that few engineers are aware of.

Invented by Jack Volder while designing a new navigation computer at Convair for the B-58A Hustler program in 1959, CORDIC – it stands for Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer – is a simple algorithm designed to calculate mathematical, trigonometric and hyperbolic mathematical functions.

The real beauty of this algorithm is that you can implement it with a very small FPGA footprint. CORDIC requires only a small lookup table, along with logic to perform shifts and additions. Importantly, the algorithm requires no dedicated multipliers or dividers.

This algorithm is one of the most helpful for DSP and industrial and control applications. Perhaps its most common use is in implementing traditional mathematical functions as shown in Table 1, where multipliers, dividers or more interesting functions are required in devices that lack dedicated  multipliers or DSP blocks.

 Table 1. Functions resulting from CORDIC configurations and mode.

For example, designers use CORDICs in many small industrial controllers to implement mathematical transfer functions and true RMS measurement. Engineers are also using CORDICs in biomedical applications to compute fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) to analyze the frequency content of many physiological signals. In this application, along with the traditional mathematical functions, designers use the CORDIC to implement the FFT twiddle factors.

To go to the original article in the XCell Journal, click here.