Fast prototyping on personal computers

Personal computers (PC) represent an attractive platform for many applications in the field of prototyping and commercial product development. They are readily available, inexpensive, and they offer a broad variety of software applications. These applications include very powerful development tools for software, printed circuit boards (PCB), and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). Numerous industrial applications require measurement of a quantity or communication with other units. In many cases custom designed acquisition boards or interface cards have to be developed. A big portion of such designs is repeated in the same or a similar form with every new implementation. For example, bus interfaces, software drivers, or communication mechanisms are often needed. With a modular design these parts can easily be extracted and reused in the next design. Using this approach, an image acquisition system was entirely designed, simulated, implemented, and tested using PC based tools for the project presented here. For maximum flexibility, an FPGA was used to implement the logic. The FPGA code is downloaded from the PC in order to be able to easily change and update the logic in the final product. The results achieved by this development are the image acquisition board on one side and a collection of modules on the other. These reusable units, such as the interface logic, the register bank in the FPGA, the download software, and the PC-side drivers, will speed up the next design. Moreover, the board itself has already been reused with a different FPGA code as an interface with a programmable power supply.