The Design And Implementation Of A Hardware Platform In Underwater Mobile Communications System

Along with the rapid exploitation of the ocean, the underwater vehicle technology has become an important means. The vehicle control commands from shore-based or ship-based platforms and status messages are usually transmited by the acoustic communication system. The content of the paper is the design and implementation of a hardware platform in the underwater mobile communications system which carries in the underwater vehicle.The application requirements of underwater vehicle is adequately taken account into the design of the system, which mainly focus on the following aspects: low-power chips, dual-processor structure - "ARM + DSP", as well as embedded real-time operating system - VxWorks. The hardware platform includes the audio codec modules, FPGA-based logic control and data buffer module, ARM-based embedded system modules and DSP-based co-processor module. The entire hardware platform is designed to realize the functions including data acquisition, communication signal processing and system control.The key of the hardware platform is a signal processing board. In the course of designing and debugging signal processing board, data access is set up by FPGA at first, which realizes the communication among FPGA, ARM and DSP. Secondly, memories and peripherals of the independent chips-based modules are debugged successfully. And low-Level software of the system is implemented subsequently. Finally, a VxWorks is built in the ARM-based embedded system module in order to realize the task scheduling and process management. Moreover, debugging the application modules relating to the hardware can be carried out in the VxWorks operating system. Thus, the basic functions are realized, which are applied to the real-time acoustic communication part of underwater vehicle.