High level design of a flexible PCA hardware accelerator using a new block-streaming method

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique for dimensionality reduction that is useful in removing redundant information in data for various applications such as Microwave Imaging (MI) and Hyperspectral Imaging (HI). The computational complexity of PCA has made the hardware acceleration of PCA an active research topic in recent years. Although the hardware design flow can be optimized using High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools, efficient high-performance solutions for complex embedded systems still require careful design. In this paper we propose a flexible PCA hardware accelerator in Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) that we designed entirely in HLS. In order to make the internal PCA computations more efficient, a new block-streaming method is also introduced. Several HLS optimization strategies are adopted to create an efficient hardware. The flexibility of our design allows us to use it for different FPGA targets, with flexible input data dimensions, and it also lets us easily switch from a more accurate floating-point implementation to a higher speed fixed-point solution. The results show the efficiency of our design compared to state-of-the-art implementations on GPUs, many-core CPUs, and other FPGA approaches in terms of resource usage, execution time and power consumption.