Hardware/Software Co-Design of a control and data acquisition system for Computed Tomography

In the last decades, the continuous advances of computed tomography sensor technology and the different medical use cases have opened new challenges for data acquisition systems: i.e. controlling and synchronising different subsystems, and acquiring and managing the huge amount of data, under real-time requirements. System-on-Chip-FPGAs are perfectly suited for all these tasks that involve hardware and software. In this paper, we propose a new acquisition system architecture for Clinical Computed Tomography (CT) for SoC, based on Hardware/Software Co-Design methodology. We discuss how to partition the different tasks (controlling, acquisition, synchronisation) on Programmable Logic (PL) and Processing System (PS) parts. Moreover, we analyse the interactions between these parts for having the performance required from the CT application. This architecture is able to control and synchronise all components inside the CT, acquire data via the optical channel, and process real-time image data in the order of 10 Gb/s, inside a single SoC.