8051 microcontroller to FPGA and ADC interface design for high speed parallel processing systems – Application in ultrasound scanners

Microcontrollers perform the hardware control in many instruments. Instruments requiring huge data throughput and parallel computing use FPGA’s for data processing. The microcontroller in turn configures the application hardware devices such as FPGA’s, ADC’s and Ethernet chips etc. The interfacing of these devices uses address/data bus interface, serial interface or serial peripheral interface. The choice of the interface depends upon the input/output pins available with different devices, programming ease and proprietary interfaces supported by devices such as ADC’s. The novelty of this paper is to describe the programming logic used for various types of interface scenarios from microcontroller to different programmable devices. The study presented describes the methods and logic flowcharts for different interfaces. The implementation of the interface logics were in prototype hardware for ultrasound scanner. The internal devices were controlled from the graphical user interface in a laptop and the scan results are taken. It is seen that the optimum solution of the hardware design can be achieved by using a common serial interface towards all the devices.