Hardware computing module for frequency Ω-counter

•A hardware computing module is designed for the frequency Ω-counter.•Computing and frequency counter modules are integrated in an FPGA device.•This solution reduce amount of data to be transferred outside the chip.•The frequency Ω-counter improves average frequency value estimation. We present a hardware computing module that calculates the frequency using timestamps and the linear regression method. This solution is known as the frequency Ω-counter and its main disadvantage is the need to perform calculations on large data sets and numbers. The presented solution is the first that integrates high resolution, multichannel frequency counter together with a computing module in one integrated circuit. This allows to significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred outside the chip, which speeds up the operation and increases the counter's capabilities. The entire design was described using hardware description language (HDL) and implemented in a Kintex-7 Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device manufactured by AMD (formerly Xilinx), targeting low consumption of logical resources to fit multiple measurement channels in one chip. The described hardware computing module operates on-the-fly without having to store all timestamps in memory. The amount of data to be calculated (up to 100,001 timestamps), the duration of the measurement gate time (up to 1 s), and the precision of the result representation can be adjusted.