Modern device concepts – digital part of a NMR spectrometer

In the development of new device concepts a lot of aspects are to consider. On the one hand there is the needing for a lot of channels which are fully synchronized with hard real-time behavior; on the other hand there are the requirements for the implementation of modern communication protocols such TCP/IP or USB to assure a full interoperability with the state-of-the-art communication infrastructure. To include the first point of view there is the necessity to develop close on the physical hardware using hardware description languages like VHDL or Verilog. This entails a high complexity of implementing the modern protocol families. The present approach based on a two layer architecture using a microcontroller for communication modules and a FPGA to realize the real-time part. The advantage of this architecture is the full scalability for each module respectively the potential to replace the real time part in the working process. In the present case, this concept is implemented as the digital part of a NMR spectrometer.