Electromagnetic (EM) computations are the cornerstone in the design process of several real-world applications, such as radar systems, satellites, and cell-phones. Unfortunately, these computations are mainly based on numerical techniques that require solving millions of linear equations simultaneously. Software-based solvers do not scale well as the number of equations-to-solve increases. FPGA solver implementations were used to speed up the process. However, using emulation technology is more appealing as emulators overcome the FPGA memory and area constraints.
In this paper, we present a scalable design to accelerate the finite element solver of an EM simulator on a hardware emulation platform. Experimental results show that our optimized solver achieves 101.05x speed-up over the same pure software implementation on MATLAB and 35.29x over the best iterative software solver from ALGLIB C++ package in case of solving 2,002,000 equations.