Development of SoC for interfacing avionics units with ARINC 429 bus

The urge for custom logic with high performance and critical time-to-market requirements in industries like avionics, defense, medicine etc. has escalated the need for programmable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Today, the most commonly used serial bus standard to connect and communicate between aircraft computer peripherals, avionics-equipments and sensors is ARINC429. Avionic units are interfaced with ARINC-429 bus with the help of units which support protocols like RS232 (Recommended Standard-232), CAN (Controller Area Network) etc. The rapidly increasing complexity of these interfacing units is result of the exponential growth in IC Technology, leading to high utilization of system resources and power, resulting in higher cost. The technological advance in system efficiency and performance has led to multiple systems on chip (SoC). This paper presents a detailed design and implementation of an SoC that interfaces RS-232 interface of avionic units with the ARINC-429 bus. Majority of this hardware is embedded into a single FPGA-fabric which results in reduced development cost and time.