Reducing the design time of configurable interfaces oriented to control applications

This paper reports an alternative solution for the rapid prototyping and for the implementation of reconfigurable interfaces oriented to microcontroller-based systems. An efficient interface must be compatible with microprocessors of different manufacturers and at the same time must fit the characteristics of the external system. The use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for the implementation of reconfigurable interfaces can be a good approach to achieve the above constraints due to the characteristics of the FPGAs for supporting different configurations. From this perspective, a useful tool for the rapid prototyping and implementation of reconfigurable interfaces based on FPGAs has been developed. This tool constitutes a wide library containing over 200 tested macrofunctions. By selecting the appropriate functions in each case (by means of the Xilinx's CAD tools), a lot of very efficient reconfigurable interfaces can be implemented in a short period of time. The library has been designed for FPGAs of the Xilinx's XC4000E family but can be easily portable to other families of FPGAs.