ISS N(Online): 2320-9801

ISS N (Print): 2320-9798

International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer

and Communication Engineering
(An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization)

Vol. 3, Issue 11, November 2015

Survey and Analysis of Data Acquisition

Systems
Hemant Shrivastava 1 , Utsav Malviya 2
1,
M.Tech Research Scholar [Embedded System & VLSI Design], Dept. of ETE, Gyan Ganga Institute of Technology
& Sciences, Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India
2
Asst. Professor, Dept. of ETE, Gyan Ganga Institute of Technology & Sciences , Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India

ABSTRACT: In various research, analysis and experimental centers and institutions irrespective of the area, there is a
necessity of acquiring the enormous amount of signals from various sources like sensors, transducers, and various
parameter measuring instruments and detectors. There are different techniques and systems to achieve the purpose.
This paper discusses about the FPGA based data acquisition systems. It presents an analytical review of the various
FPGA based data acquisition and control systems, how a Data acquisition board commun icates with the front en d
diagnostics, the control PCs, what are the basic co mponents of data acquisition system. It also discusses about the
hardware used for interaction of FPGA core of data acquisition with the control PC, their shortcomings. It then
proposes the alternative solution to overcome those flaws based on current needs of data acquisition systems, and to
make it more generalized, cost effective and which will help it for mu lti-functioning.

KEYWORDS: FPGA; Data acquisition, Control PC

I. INTRO DUCTION

Data Acquisition is a process to study and measure various physical world parameters whether it is voltage,
temperature, or pressure, etc. in dig ital do main, i.e. any monitoring and control system, which acquires the signals
using respective sensors or transducers, and an acquiring system or board which condition the signal as a data for
analysis, measurement and control. The most basic Data Acquisition system consists of various sensors and detectors
mounted for capturing the respective physical condition, data acquisition hardware, and a monitoring and control unit.

There are various techniques and systems that are used for this purpose. Some systems use the hardware with the
processing and control core of microcontrollers, CPLDs or the FPGA . The choice of any of these is dependent upon the
application, environ ment, speed and accuracy requirements. The hardware may contain various other modules along
with the processing and control core, like ADCs, DACs, memory, FIFOs and other application specific modules . Apart
fro m all these modules and core, another important component is the interfacing module and protocol used for the
communicat ion between the acquisition hardware and the control and monitoring system i.e. a control PC.

II. DATA ACQ UISITIO N AND CONTRO L FLOW

A Data Acquisition and control assembly of any industrial or experimental setup have some generalized basic
component blocks. A typical generalized Data Acquisition and Control flow is shown in figure 1. Referring the figure
we can observe that the flow initiates from the physical world parameters which is captured by the sensors or
transducers to be converted as an analog signals which are received by the Data Acquisition card or board via signal
conditioning unit. The data acquisition board or card can be centralized on FPGA, Microcontrollers, DSP processors or
Microprocessors. The acquired and processed data is then sent to the Data Acquisition and control PC for mon itoring
and control through the interface unit. Here, RS232, CAN, Ethernet or USB any of t hese protocol based interfacing unit
can be used.

Copyright to IJIRCCE DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2015. 0311211 11341

 ISS N(Online): 2320-9801
ISS N (Print): 2320-9798

International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer

and Communication Engineering
(An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization)

Vol. 3, Issue 11, November 2015

Figure 1: General Data Acquisition and Control Flo w

III. R ELATED WORK

As mentioned earlier there are various Data Acquisition System boards are proposed by several authors with
different functionalities, methodologies, protocols and cores. Some of them are mentioned here which serves as a
reference for the purpose. In [1] authors have designed a data acquisition system based on the embedded PC/104
platform. The CPLD is used as a control and bus interface logic core. The embedded single board co mputer with
PC/ 104 bus is used as a main processing unit wh ich has Windows XP embedded operating system support. The
system is designed to cope up with the ADITYA TOKAMAK‟s data acquisition system, which has MDSp lus and
MATLAB based client application. In [2], authors has presented a microcontroller based DAQ system. Their work
focus on designing a real time Data acquisition System based on PIC microcontroller as a core, the system
communicates with control PC v ia USB and the application program for the PC is developed using MATLAB. Here,
the system is application specific and lacks flexible functionality; also the designer must have to be well versed in both
PIC microcontroller‟s embedded C programming and the MATLAB. A lso the use of USB cable makes it most useful
for short range but inappropriate for long distance. Authors of [3] have also used one of the PIC microcontrollers for
their acquisition system along with USB interfacing to interact with PC. The visual basic programming is used for
saving the data acquired and graphical interface as well. In [4]Arduino based data acquisition system is presented by
the authors. The single chip computer with Atmega32 controller core i.e. an Arduino board is used. The application for
GUI is developed using LabVIEW platform on the control PC which communicates with the Arduino based Data
monitoring system through USB. In [5]the authors have mentioned about the disadvantages of microprocessors
&microcontrollers for data acquisition, i.e. these have the shortcoming of having slow speed of acquisition, lack of
flexib ility and memory. As a solution to this , the FPGA is used to acquire the signal and LCD for the display of that
data. The authors in [6] have presented an acquisition system for Linu x OS using MAXIM‟s IC MAX197, and Ethernet
for co mmunicat ion between system and the Linu x OS based PC. The client program in Linu x PC is implemented on
Qt4 and coded using MySQL. Another Linu x based embedded DAS is presented by authors of [7]. The embedded
Linu x platfo rm is imp lemented on Xilin x Virtex -5 FPGA having a PPC440 hard block, the FPGA is mounted on the
ML507 board and the board is connected with the Host machine using Ethernet. The author of [8] has presented an
acquisition system on Altera FPGA. A 16 bit processor is implemented on this FPGA for Ethernet and data flow
control initialization. All the coding and simu lation of the system is done on the Libero platform. Authors of [9] have
also used the FPGA fro m Altera, and it uses USB to interact with the PC. The work presented in [10] is aim to develop
a system in which FPGA will be responsible for control of network and the data transmission over Ethernet which has
a advantages of long distance, high speed etc. The W5300, wiznet‟s Ethernet controller is used here for establishing the
TCP/ IP co mmunication link between system and the control PC. Authors of [11] have presented an embedded Data
acquisition system on Xilin x Virtex – II FPGA. Both soft IP cores of the processors i.e. PPC and MicroBlaze are used
for serving the purpose of controlling unit. The work is also based on the Real Time OS. The GUI is made in a National
Instrument‟s software; Lab VIEW. In [12] the authors have presented an application specific FPGA based data
acquisition system. The MicroBlaze soft processor in FPGA is used for controlling the data flow within the peripherals

Copyright to IJIRCCE DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2015. 0311211 11342

 ISS N(Online): 2320-9801
ISS N (Print): 2320-9798

International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer

and Communication Engineering
(An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization)

Vol. 3, Issue 11, November 2015

and to the network. Wiznet‟s WIZ830MJ containing W5300, an Ethernet controller is used as a link to establish the
TCP/ IP based communicat ion link between control PC and the acquisition board via Ethernet.

IV. PRO POSED APPROACH FO R THE DATA ACQ UISITIO N SYSTEM

All these approaches or works by different authors have their own plus points depending on their application, but these
all have some shortcomings too. So by analysing all these references, an approach for designing a general purpose data
acquisition system with the aim of achiev ing flexib ility, speed, accuracy, ease of use and design is proposed in this
paper.
A. Description of the Proposed Data Acquisition system approach:
With the aim of flexib ility in mind FPGA is chosen as a core for the Data acquisition board. FPGA is selected over
any microcontroller because FPGA ‟s are more flexib le in terms of pro gramming while microcontrollers or
microprocessors has some limitations being a hard wired system i.e. they have limited transistor memo ry lo wer as
compared to the FPGA. Also FPGA is user defined and can operate in both sequential and in parallel manner as well,
i.e. any logic o r functionality can be defined by the user according to the application they want to perform. On the other
hand microcontrollers and microprocessors are predefined and perform the operations in sequential manner only. With
the functionality of soft IP cores of microcontrollers like McroBlaze and Po wer PC440 the requirement of sequential
programming and control can be achieved by the FPGA. Fo r our system we have selected the Xilin x make FPGA and
used soft IP core of Micro Blaze for peripheral control and data flow between system and the control PC over network
as well.
With the recent trends microcontrollers and microprocessors comes with the feature of high throughput and are
compact too. So, instead of using any external p rocessor such as Single Board Co mputers with PC/104 bus interface,
which has the drawbacks as , being bulky and costly, having low throughput, also using them will force the user to use
an external power supply so as to power the board and the SBC separately. This makes the whole assembly less
portable and also requires keen maintenance. So, MicroBlaze and an Ethernet controller IC that can be mounted on the
board along with PC can be used to displace the whole bulky SBC system. W5300 is an Ethernet controller which has
Ethernet and network capabilities and has TCP/IP protocol stack for data communication used here to serve as a
TCP/ IP based communicat ion link between the board and the Ethernet network and fu rther with the control PC.
With all these additions the proposed system can be said to be an Ethernet based system for acquiring data from
physical environ ment or the experimental setup, for monitoring and control of the front end instruments and physical
parameters too. Use of Ethernet here makes the system portable and also free the who le assembly fro m the limitat ion of
distance that are faced in case of using RS232, CAN o r USB based DAQ boards.
Another important part of any data acquisition is a user interface for control and mon itoring and a system to save
the acquired data. So, to achieve the purpose, a Graphical User Interface is proposed to be developed on the LabVIEW
platform. .

V. EXP ECTED OUTCO ME FRO M THE PRO POSED SYSTEM

Through studies and analysis, the hardware and the system proposed seeking to follow and achieve the aim is
expected to successfully follo w and complete the follo wing steps for getting an end module to serve as the data
acquisition and control system. These steps are:

1. Progressing with programming for FPGA on Xilin x IDE p latform an d including the Micro Blaze soft IP core in it
2. Interfacing the W5300 with the FPGA v ia Micro-Controller System of M icro Blaze
3. Developing a TCP Client program using graphical programming on Lab VIEW
4. Making a TCP server on board by programming, and establishing a TCP/IP client server communicat ion link
between board and the control PC with client GUI on Lab VIEW plat form
5. Now, as ADC and DA C are the integral part of an acquisit ion system so these have to be interfaced with FPGA
too. So, ADC and DA C driver program are also included on the main DA Q program.
6. First of all it is expected that the signals should be properly digitized by the ADC and should be able to reach
FPGA p roperly
7. The digital signals received from the ADC should be captured by the DAC via FPGA and c an be monitored by the
controller in GUI at control PC

Copyright to IJIRCCE DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2015. 0311211 11343

 ISS N(Online): 2320-9801
ISS N (Print): 2320-9798

International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer

and Communication Engineering
(An ISO 3297: 2007 Certified Organization)

Vol. 3, Issue 11, November 2015

8. The controller with the help of the Lab VIEW based GUI should be able to man ipulate the parameters and signal
voltage level accurately via a Ethernet link sitt ing far away fro m the experimental assembly.

VI. CO NCLUSION AND FUTURE WO RK

To design a flexib le, h igh speed, relatively economical and portable general purpose data acquisition which can
serve mult iple functions and includes ease of use, a survey and analysis of several works and respective literat ures have
been done. This survey results in selecting and capturing the approach which serve the desired proposed system. With
the results of the analysis in mind now the proposed system is to be developed following the stated steps and will be
tested for the desired operation.

R EFERENCES

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B IOGRAPHY

Hemant Shri vastava is a Master of Technology research scholar in Embedded System and VLSI Design stream, Gyan
Ganga Institute of Technology and Sciences , Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India.

Utsav Mal viya is an Asst. Professor in Electronics and Commun ication Engineering department, Gyan Ganga Institute
of Technology and Sciences , Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, India.

Copyright to IJIRCCE DOI: 10.15680/IJIRCCE.2015. 0311211 11344