FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Measurement Instruments with Functionality Defined by User
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FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Measurement Instruments with Functionality Defined by User Guo-Ruey Tsai and Min-Chuan Lin Department of Electronics Engineering, Kun-Shan University of Technology, Taiwan Received 2 October 2004; Revised 5 March 2005; Accepted 25 May 2005 Using the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with embedded software-core processor and/or digital signal processor cores, we are able to construct a hardware kernel for measurement instruments, which can fit common electronic measurement and test requirements. We call this approach the software-defined instrumentation (SDI). By properly configuring, we have used the hardware kernel to implement an n-channel arbitrary waveform generator with various add-on functions, a wideband and precise network analyzer, a high-speed signal digitizer, and a real-time sweep spectrum analyzer. With adaptively reconfiguring the hardware kernel, SDI concept can easily respond to the rapidly changing user-application-specified needs in measurement and test markets. Copyright © 2006 Hindawi Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.
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INTRODUCTION
As the power of FPGA increases [1, 2], we find ourselves with the ability to design, simulate, analyze, and even emulate the more complex devices with application-specified embedded processor and/or digital signal processor cores. From the viewpoint of SDI concept [3], the process of measurement has been reduced only to signal excitation, captures, conditioning, processing, and output display as illustrated in Figure 1 [4]. Figure 2 illustrates that the traditional instrumentation technique depends on digital signal processor, microprocessor unit, virtual instruments, application-specified integrated circuit (ASIC), or FPGA, which are in charge of the responsibility of signal conditioning and signal processing. The instrument market is fragmented because instruments are specialized in hardware to serve thousands of slightly divergent test applications. In fact, the traditional classification of measurement instruments (such as voltmeter, frequency counter, function generator, oscilloscope, signal analyzer, etc.) has become blurred, and to some extent can be replaced with a single set of reconfigurable hardware, called hardware kernel. The hardware kernel can be reconfigured by software to implement a specified measurement instrument. With such a software-defined architecture concept applied to the circuit level, we have two advantages. First, it can dramatically reduce the number of hardware components in all mixed-signal designs. This then possibly means a much smaller chip size for system-on-chip
implementation. Second, it can provide automatic adjustment or compensation for circuit component variations due to temperature dependence, aging, manufacturing tolerances, and so forth. Current high-performance FPGA is richly equipped with built-in on-chip SRAM, which includes block RAM and distributed RAM. Therefore, either logic circuits using tablelookup algorithm or embedded processor in system-onchip application could utiliz
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