Development Of Intelligent Platform Management Controller Of AXIe Instrument Module

As the newest architecture specification for instrumentation and test, the AXIe provides an extensible platform for general purpose, modular instrumentation. The user can choose to establish appropriate test system flexibly with the different instrument modules, as required. For the reason that instrument modules may be produced by different manufactures, it is a big problem for users to implement the effective unified management of the instrument modules. The intelligent platform management controller of AXIe instrument can solve the problem and improve the availability and maintainability of the AXIe architecture. In additio n, there is no intelligent platform management controller for AXIe instrument module in the domestic market. Therefor, there is urgent demand and application significance for developing intelligent platform management controller of AXIe instrument module.Based on the research of AXIe specification, this thesis analyzes the architecture composition of AXIe intelligent platform management system, determines the functions of platform management controller and establishes the overall design scheme. The scheme selects FPGA as the control chip, Qsys as the system built on the chip and Nios II embedded processor as the system processor on the chip.The development of platform management controller is divided into hardware design and software design. In hardware design, the scheme designs the hardware circuit, builds Qsys system on chip and constructs interface IP core of platform management controller. The main functions of interface IP core are the functions such as sensor data acquisition and command transceiver. In software design, the programs run within the Nios II embedded processor. The Nios II processor plays a key role in state transition of instrument module and communication with Shelf Management Controller.Finally, comprehensive testing and performance analysis are conducted including IPMB interface testing and state transition testing of the instrument module. The testing results show that functionality of Intelligent Platform Management Controller of AXIe Instrument module meet the design requirements.