FPGA Based SOPC Realization Of Data Acquisition System

This paper deals with an FPGA based SOPC realization of data acquisition system and its communication with AD converter using IIC bus. XC2S100, one of the FPGA chips in Spartan-II series is selected for the system into which a software core MicroBlaze is embedded. MicroBlaze is a software core of 32 bit MCU developed by Xilinx. MCP3221 is used here as an AD converter with IIC bus which is produced by Microchip. The communication part between MCU and IIC AD converter is built inside the chip. It can be called as a 'system on a chip'.The chip could communicate with upper machine with similar structure. The upper machine for communication to server is fulfilled by VHDL language. In such a way, a quasi-digital acquisition system is setup within which MCU, instruction memory, data memory and other logic parts are integrated together. Only a few analog devices and amplifies are outside the chip. A server could serve for multi-chips in an acquisition system. The users' software of sever is written in VB. It can show the acquisition data by either data form or graphic form.Data acquisition system is a necessary part for any control systems, so a single chip design could be reused everywhere. The attractive advantage of such kind of design is that it can be redesigned and improved easily without changing chip so that the cost and reliability is higher than others.