Gravitational Particle Simulator using FPGA

This hardware simulator will attempt to improve on the work of Mark Eiding and Brian Curless from Cornell University. Their project simulated particles of different masses interacting with each other in demonstration of Newton’s law of universal gravitation. This was done by utilizing floating point operations to complete the calculations, and a processor to collect relevant data and update the VGA display. This project takes every task from the processor and assigning it to hardware, effectively running the whole program on an FPGA. The computation engine is responsible for calculating each particle’s acceleration in 3-dimensions, which is then used to update the particles respective velocity and position. The location of each particle is simultaneously displayed via VGA controlled by the visual interface, which determines whether the value at each pixel should be black or white depending on the existence of a particle at or near the pixel’s location.