Bundle Sensor Data Acquisitions with an FPGA
A sensor hub takes care of all sensors, no matter of their individual communication bus, timing requirements or update rates. The FPGA bundles all data, performs signal conditioning and can maintain each sensor individually (e.g. reconfigure them when swapped).
Benefits are:
- each sensor (~ category) can be treated completely independent of others
- signal preconditioning/filtering to reduce computation efforts of host
- parallel readouts for multiple sensors on different buses
- custom high speed data transmission to host controller/CPU
Computing advantage with a Sensor Hub
In conventional arrangements, the computing processor is resposible for the acquisition of the sensor data. Usually the bus data rate to the sensor is much lower than the clock rate of the processor. Arranged like this, the processor is waiting many clock cycles to get several 16/24bit values from usually more than one sensor. This leads to computational dead times of several milliseconds. When a sensor hub is acquiring the data of all sensors, then all data can be transferred to the host at once. This leads to data transmission durations which are several decades lower than in a classical arrangement.
The versatility of FPGAs allows any customization regarding your needs. Let us get in touch to find out how it can improve your application.