AN IMPROVED 16 BY 1 ARRAY PHOTON COUNTING FOR SOIL SPECTROSCOPY USING BRENT KUNG ADDER

Abstract

The traditional process in farming involves many steps of hard labour, which are bush clearing, irrigation and the introduction of manual soil testing. It was evident that the traditional methods of ways of nutrients testing are associated with errors and labour intensive. This paper aim to address the shortcoming by proposing a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based photon counting system using 16 bits parallel adder (Brent Kung) algorithm to ease the process with the precise result than the conventional. The algorithm used permits parallel computation, high speed and is user friendly on low-cost FPGA module. Verilog hardware description language (HDL) was used on the Vivado suite platform for implementation. The simulation was conducted under different conditions by changing the sample signal with various degrees of frequency. It was found that the proposed FPGA based photon counting system has an improvement in frequency of 46% and reduction of 46% Look-Up Table (LUT), 92% reduction of fan-out over the conventional, which has a frequency of 480 MHz through a tradeoff was seen in the total power.