A Reconfigurable Hardware Architecture for Principal Component Analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the widely used techniques for dimensionality reduction in multivariate statistical analysis. This article presents an efficient architecture design and implementation of the PCA algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The designed reconfigurable architecture is modeled in both floating-point and fixed-point representations using our custom-developed library of numerical operations. The PCA architecture supports input dataset matrices with parameterizable dimensions. The synthesizable model of the PCA architecture is modeled in Verilog hardware description language, and its cycle-accurate and bit-true simulation results are verified against its software simulation models. The characteristics and implementation results of the PCA architecture on a Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA and in a standard 45-nm CMOS technology are presented. The execution times of the implemented PCA system on the FPGA for different data sizes are compared with those of the graphics processing unit and general-purpose processor implementations. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first high-throughput design and implementation of the reconfigurable PCA architecture, including both the learning and mapping phases, on a single FPGA.