Architecture for real time continuous sorting on large width data volume for fpga based applications

Abstract: In engineering applications sorting is an important and widely studied problem where execution speed and resources used for computation are of extreme importance, especially if we think about real time data processing. Most of the traditional sorting techniques compute the process after receiving all of the data and hence the process needs large amount of resources for data storage. So, suitable design strategy needs to be adopted if we wish to sort a large amount of data in real time, which essential means higher speed of process execution and utilization of fewer resources in most of the cases. This paper proposes a single chip scalable architecture based on Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA), for a modified counting sort algorithm where data acquisition and sorting is being done in real time scenario. Our design promises to work efficiently, where data can be accepted in the run time scenario without any need of prior storage of data and also the execution speed of our algorithm is invariant to the length of the data stream. The proposed design is implemented and verified on Spartan 3E(XC3S500E-FG320) FPGA system. The results prove that our design is better in terms of some of the design parameters compared to the existing research works.