Development of seismic data acquisition based on ARM-Linux

Recent years have seen significant improvement and wide-spread use of digital embedded computers in seismology. However, these commercial devices are normally costly and restricted to modification or upgrade. This paper presents a development of a cost-effective seismic acquisition system based on ARM-Linux. A device driver which interacts with a Direct Memory Access (DMA) feature is developed for helping the processor manage reading large amount of data from a high resolution ADC. Experimental results show that using DMA can reduce processor workload about 25%. The system can also store the data in a MINISEED format.