Final year electronics project – FPGA audio processor

Here’s my final year university project for my electronic and electrical engineering degree.

I explored the use of an FPGA for digitally processing audio in real time, as well as creating some common audio effects (in VHDL) – delay, reverb, filter, flanger etc. Scroll down to see it in action (video)…

This project could be the basis, and framework, to create pretty much any audio effect.

Project title: The design and realisation of an FPGA based audio processor

This is a super low latency digital audio effects processor using an FPGA and the Altera DE2 development board. The audio (guitar, mic, whatever) is connected to the input of the DE2 board to be digitised and processed according to what effect is selected. Everything is written in VHDL using Quartus II V11.0. New effects can be written in VHDL then converted to a block symbol and routed in to the existing system at the top level.

I made a rotary control box that interfaces dynamically with each effect block, depending on what is currently selected. The LED bar on the control box shows the value of parameter currently being adjusted (or the last one to be adjusted).

The project took 6 months in total and got me a decent mark for my degree. You can download my scanned notebook (with every single note I wrote down as I developed this project) and my full report in PDF format at the bottom of the page.

Latency is super low at less than 1ms. If you want to know how to use the Wolfson WM8731 CODEC on the Altera DE2 board (or any other FPGA development board) then hopefully this report will give you a massive head start. This took a while to get my head around.

I made a rotary encoder control box to have full control over all the effects and parameters within the VHDL code.

Report abstract…

Quartus II v11.0 and SOPC Builder have been used to design and create the VHDL code to be synthesised. The implementation of the VHDL design uses the DE2 development board from the Altera which is based around a Cyclone EP2C25 FPGA device having 35000 logic elements.

Four audio effects were explored and implemented: echo, flanger, filter and reverb. External control to the FPGA was implemented using rotary encoders to change various effect parameters and visual feedback been given through an LCD. The final design utilises a NIOS II soft-core processor to form part of the user interface. The results show that the total system latency of the FPGA audio processor was considerably less than a computer software application; less than 1ms compared to 10ms.

The initial concept has been proven using a total of 11702 logic elements. There is much scope for development of the final project. Future work could focus on a more user-friendly system in terms of the user interface and also the creation of more advanced audio effects.

See the audio effects in action

Download my full report and design notebook

Here’s the final report (PDF)

Here’s the final report that I handed in for my final year project of my electronics engineering degree: https://gum.co/fpga-audio-effects-final-year-project-mike-hudson

My scanned notebook (PDF): 

I kept a notebook of all my design notes, ideas, sketches, problems and solutions: https://gum.co/fpga-audio-processor-final-year-notebook