Design Of PXIe Embedded Controller

The high-speed development of technologies in aerospace and military areas raises the needs for reliability, integration and automation of the auto test systems. PXIe is a high-performance modular integrated auto test system, and can provide ideal solution for related fields. This thesis finishes developing the embedded controller of the PXIe test platform based on the in-depth analysis of PXIe specification.The controller is the manager and scheduler of the auto test platform, thus its performance is crucial to the whole system. Power PC processors are widely used in aerospace and military areas due to their high reliability and stability. The thesis develops the PXIe embedded controller based on the high-end product MPC8572 E of Power PC processor family.The thesis analyzes the boot up sequence of MPC8572 E in detail, and brings up the design scheme of computer minimal system, front panel general purpose IO interfaces and PXIe interfaces. Computer minimal system includes power, POR, and storage systems. General computer interfaces include UART and Ethernet. PXIe interfaces include PCIe interface, SMBus interface and trigger bus as well as GA interface. As for software, U-Boot and Linux is used respectively as bootloader and operating system, based on which PXIe instrument drivers are implemented. The thesis particularly analyzes the boot-up procedure of U-Boot, introduces the initialization sequence of Linux based on Open Firmware mechanism, and describes the design and implementation of PXIe instrument drivers in detail.The thesis finishes the work of debugging the functioning modules and testing the overall performance of the embedded controller based on the PXIe platform chassis with PXIe and PXI peripherals. Results got from the system software shows that all the hardware interfaces work normally and the backplane bandwidth of the controller meets the PXIe specification’s requirements.