A single-chip solution for interfacing transducers to sensor networks using FPGAs

A virtual laboratory application requires sensors to be setup at different geographical locations but controlled centrally at a remote site. The sensors in such applications need to be physically small, consume low power and capable of local processing tasks facilitating mobility to spread the sensor network system in a vast geographic area. In this paper, we present the design of a low-cost smart sensor node developed using a reconfigurable Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) that embeds all processing and communication functionalities based on IEEE 1451 family of standards. The single chip design facilitates increased speedup of processing due to interprocess communication taking place within the chip itself. Results indicate the stability and the performance of the proposed architecture at different baud rates.