Smart module for measurements based on direct interfaces and FPGA-SoC

A FPGA System on Chip (FPSoC) is used to implement a smart module to acquire data from resistive sensors. The module is composed of low-cost direct interfaces to connect the sensors to a FPGA and a processing unit. Both hardware elements, FPGA and a dual ARM core processing unit are inside a FPSoC device (Intel FPGA Cyclone V SE). The FPSoC capture module includes three units of data processing: statistics in the FPGA section, calibration and error compensation of measurements in the HPS (Hardware Processing System) section. The performance of the FPSoC system and the implementation in a microcontroller MSP430 are compared. Improvements with the FPSoC system in data acquisition time and error reduction in measurements are reported together with a brief description of the FPSoC system architecture.