Author: John Charlton

FPGA programming: For high performance data acquisition Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are the way to go. In the last project we developed a data acquisition system for ultrasound signal processing. In that application we transmitted an ultrasound pulse through a wire terminal crimp during a crimp. At 200 usec intervals we took 300 to 600 samples of both the echo and the through transmitted ultrasound signal simultaneously at 150 Msamples/sec. We designed parallel digital logic to read the two 14 bit analog-to-digital values and transfer all 28 bits to internal FPGA RAM in one 150 MHz clock cycle.  At the beginning of each ultrasound pulse we also sampled and transmitted the crimper  force and position signals.  We used Verilog HDL to program the Cyclone V/GX FPGA digital logic and Altera Quartus II to compile the FPGA code.