A Real-Time Acoustic Spectrum Analyzer on FPGA for the Internet of Underwater Things

The deployment of a low-power broadband acoustic spectrum analyzer in the ocean is of substantial interest, particularly for underwater monitoring applications. This paper presents a real-time spectrum analyzer implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array. The resource requirement is reduced by using a novel implementation of the Hann window at the input of the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm. Also, using a logarithmic scale, the frequency range represented is equal to 32,768 Hz. The design is demonstrated using Xilinx’s Artix-7 System-on-Chip. To verify the accuracy of the implemented circuit, it is compared against the performance of an ideal simulated circuit in Matlab.