Ray Tracer

The FPGA-based ray tracer was created as part of one of my embedded systems capstone classes and was a project focused on implementing ray tracing on an FPGA with hardware acceleration to see if this would be a feasible and cheaper alternative to high-end dedicated graphics cards. The FPGA board we used was the Terasic DE10-Nano.

To implement the ray tracer, we did the following:

• Created ray tracing C code to act as a baseline and validation method
• Outlined the FPGA implementation by creating four major hardware modules that would implement the ray tracing architecture
• Created SystemVerilog code and validated using data from the initial C code and using Universal Verification Methodology in ModelSim
• Verified the ability to synthesize using Synplify Premier
• Integrate the actual hardware modules onto the FPGA using Intel’s Quartus software