Efficient FPGA Implementation of PCA Algorithm for Large Data using High Level Synthesis

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a widely used method for dimensionality reduction in different application areas, including microwave imaging where the size of input data is large. Despite its popularity, one of the difficulties in using PCA is its high computational complexity, especially for large dimensional data. In recent years several FPGA implementations have been proposed to accelerate PCA computation. However, most of them use manual RTL design, which requires more time for design and development. In this paper, we propose an FPGA implementation of PCA using High Level Synthesis (HLS), which allows us to explore the design space more efficiently than with hand-coded RTL design. Starting from a PCA algorithm written in C++, we apply various hardware optimization techniques to the same code using Vivado HLS in order to quickly explore the design space. Our experiments show that the performance of the design obtained with the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art RTL design in terms of resource utilization, latency and frequency.