Implementation and Performance Analysis of Multi Channel ARINC 429 Controller on FPGA

Communication interface is one of the most important part for an electronic equipment in an avionic vehicle especially commercial (civil) ones. Data buses like Arinc-429 and Arinc-664 are solves this part. In this paper, Ethernet based multi-channel Arinc-429 controller is implemented and analyzed on Xilinx FPGAs. A fully functional digital design for Arinc-429 data bus controller is developed. It converts Arinc-429 bus to Ethernet bus. Avionics LRU manufacturers who need to develop a multi-channel Arinc-429 converter can benefit from this design approach and methodology. Xilinx Artix-7 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device is used for the implementation. Arty A7 development board and HI-3593 ARINC Dual Receiver/Single Transmitter Demo Board was used in the experiment. The design controls 6 receiver channels and 3 transmit channels. Each receiver channel has dedicated buffer to store bus data. The hole design uses 9279 slice LUTs, 7233 slice registers, 4 RAMB36s, 92 RAMB18s and 46 IOB. So, a low cost and portable- (generic) implementation is achieved.