An Operation-Server Based Data Acquisition System Architecture

Developments in networked embedded system technologies and programmable logic are making it possible to design new, highly flexible data acquisition system (DAS) architectures. We present a networked DAS architecture where the software resources required by the data acquisition (DAQ) units are acquired from a server dynamically, to be stored and executed in local memory. When the DAQ unit needs to call an operation not contained in its memory, the new operation is requested from the server, while resources occupied by operations that have not been used recently are released to make space for it. In this way it is possible to reduce the resource use of the embedded DAQ unit to only what is necessary for efficient operation in its major modes. Since new code is easily distributed to the DAQ units from the server, system upgrades are also simplified.