Design And Implementation Of Fiber-optic Image Transmission System Based On PCI Express

High frame rate and high resolution image acquisition has a wide range of applications in high-tech research, industry, health care, transportation, aviation and many other fields, such as capturing the movement of high-speed objects in aerospace and military,3D animation, video positioning and measurement, high-speed road traffic monitoring. However, the continuous acquisition of this image will produce an enormous amount of data. So, it becomes an urgent problem that how to transfer these high-speed image data to remote computer in real time for analysis and processing.Optical fiber communication has many characteristics, such as high frequency bandwidth, low loss, high precision anti-interference ability, so it meets the requirements of long distance high-speed data transmission. Compared with PCI and PCI-X bus, PCI Express has great advantages, especially a large rate increase. In PCI Express 1.0 standard, the speed of single channel reaches up to 2.5Gbps, and the maximum 32 channels are supported. This paper uses the advantages of both technologies to design a high-speed data transmission system which can transfer the high-speed image data to remote computer in real time.In respect of hardware, a PCI Express fiber-optic card which adopts Xilinx Spartan-6 LXT FPGA as the main controller was designed. On the card, PCI Express bus protocol was achieved by IP core in FPGA, and optical fiber communication was achieved by GTP transceiver and SFP module. The logic in FPGA was designed by Verilog HDL, including data transceiver through fiber optic, FIFO buffer, PIO operation, interrupt controller and DMA transfer of PCI Express bus. All of logic function modules were simulated and tested strictly.In respect of software, a PCI Express driver based on WDM was developed by Windows DDK, which achieves interrupt response, DMA programming, hardware registers reading and writing and the interface for application. On the basis of driver, a MFC-based application was developed in Visual C++ development environment to receive, display and storage the high-speed image. In the application, multi-threading, DrawDib graphics and many other programming technology was used to improve the software performance.At the end of paper, the system debugging process and test results was discussed. After testing, the system speeds up to 1.2Gbps and was stable and reliable for image transmission.