FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Data Acquisition System for Industrial Sensors

A sensor data acquisition system is an essential part of an industrial automation control system. However, the variety of sensor producer causes the difficulty of protocol's unity. The mechanism which requires the acquisition boards to be powered off when the number or types or manufacturer of sensors is changed is unreasonable. Meanwhile, traditional sensor reading cycle depends more on the embedded program skills. In this paper, to solve these problems, a new method is proposed to design a reconfigurable data acquisition system for industrial sensors, in which field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is adopted as the core controller. We use both dynamic system reconfiguration and static system reconfiguration in our design. Performance of the proposed system is verified in practical application of an automated production system of poly carboxylic acid water reducing agent.