Implementation of an industrial process control interface for the LSC11 system using Lattice ECP2M FPGA

Sammanfattning: Reconfigurable devices are the mainstream in today’s system on chip solutions. Reconfigurable devices have the advantages of reduced cost over their equivalent custom design, quick time to market and the ability to reconfigure the design at will and ease. One such reconfigurable device is an FPGA. In this industrial thesis, the design and implementation of a control process interface using ECP2M FPGA and PCIe communication is accomplished. This control process interface is designed and implemented for a 3-D plotter system called LSC11. In this thesis, the FPGA unit implemented drives the plotter device based on specific timing requirements charted by the customer. The FPGA unit is interfaced to a Host CPU in this thesis (through PCIe communication) for controlling the LSC11 system using a custom software. All the peripherals required for the LSC11 system such as the ADC, DAC, Quadrature decoder and the PWM unit are also implemented as part of this thesis. This thesis also implements an efficient methodology to send all the inputs of the LSC11 system to the Host CPU without the necessity for issuing any cyclic read commands on the Host CPU. The RTL design is synthesised in FPGA and the system is verified for correctness and accuracy. The LSC11 system design consumed 79% of the total FPGA resources and the maximum clock frequency achieved was 130 Mhz. This thesis has been carried out at Abaxor Engineering GmbH, Germany. It is demonstrated in this thesis how FPGA aids in quick designing and implementation of system on chip solutions with PCIe communication.