FPGA Implementation of Sine and Cosine Value Generators using Cordic Algorithm for Satellite Attitude Determination and Calculators

Abstract

The trigonometric functions sine and cosine have found numerous applications in various areas. For Satellites, the smallest category envisioned is the “femptosat” which would weigh less than one-tenth of a kilogram, a satellite that would handle very simple missions and would be implemented on a single chip. One of the elementary things required in these satellites is the Satellite Attitude Determination System. The Satellite Attitude Determination system requires the calculation of sine and cosine values with good accuracy. Normally these values are calculated using a software. In this paper using Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer (CORDIC) algorithm we propose an architecture for the calculation of sine and cosine values which is much faster than the software counterpart and also occupies very small area on the chip. This architecture is also suitable for systems like calculator where the chip count has to be reduced. Also this approach uses a very small lookup table resulting into very small memory requirement.