DEVELOPMENT OF AN FPGA-BASED SOC DESIGN FOR REAL-TIME DATA PROCESSING AND CONTROL

Abstract

The latest technology in the field of digital design is the re-configurability of the hardware which is Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The high speed digital system can be programmed on FPGA using Hardware Description Language (HDL). The parallel processing of the design by using FPGA makes this technology vital in high speed application and applications where critical speed requirement is the utmost priority. The Institute for Data Processing and Electronics (IPE) at KIT has developed a multi-purpose data acquisition platform for broad range of applications ranging from photon science, electron beam diagnostics and high energy physics experiments. Modern physics experiments produce several GB/s data so it demands high throughput Data Acquisition (DAQ) system with latencies in microseconds. To achieve these stringent constraints, a heterogeneous system based on FPGA, GPU and CPU coupled by InfiniBand is developed. The next generation of this platform should reach a data throughput of 240 Gb/s and above. To cope this high throughput, we will use the latest Xilinx Zynq System on Chip (SoC), which combines an FPGA and an ARM processor in one chip and integrate it in our Data Acquisition platform.