FPGA Design of RISC-V MCU Collaborative Industrial Printer Control System

The industrial printer control system was proposed in this research with a hardware architecture to support four print heads simultaneously. The system quickly and accurately calculated the printing distance and time of inkjet printing to achieve high-quality printing effects. In terms of vertical resolution, the system provided options such as 600, 300, 150, and 75 DPI. Horizontally, the system performed various DPI printing by detecting and calculating the speed of the rotary encoder. Following high-quality printing standards, the printing performance of industrial printers was enhanced, and the fastest printing speed reached 943 m/min. This industrial printer control system was implemented on an Altera FPGA incorporating the design of a reduced instruction set computer-V (RISC-V) microcontroller unit (MCU) [2] and an in-circuit debugger (ICD). The RISC-V MCU has a three-stage pipeline architecture to improve performance through parallel processing. The design was streamlined and modular to reduce costs, and an EBI BUS was added to communicate with peripheral devices. The ICD was used to monitor the status of the printing control system at any time and display the printing situation on the software platform. These comprehensive functions allowed industrial printers to have more complete functions and expandability. Using the SystemVerilog hardware description language, ModelSim’s HDL simulation software was modified and tested. The functionality was verified through the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) program to ensure that it’s correct. The implementation results can achieve the functions of an industrial printer control system with a speed of 100MHz.