EPICS 2016

DEVELOPMENT OF ADVANCED DATA AND IMAGE ACQUISITION SYSTEMS USING RIO TECHNOLOGY AND EPICS: INTEGRATION IN ITER

26 May 2016, 09:45

15m

Medicon Village Auditorium (Lund)

EPICS Collaboration meeting - main session

Speakers

Mr Esquembri Sergio (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid)Dr Mariano Ruiz (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)

Description

IRIO Technology is a set of software tools developed for National Instruments Reconfigurable Input/Output (RIO) hardware, to simplify the development cycle and the integration of advanced data acquisition applications in EPICS. RIO devices are implemented using XILINX FPGAs. These reconfigurable devices have to be programmed using the LabVIEW for FPGA tool that works directly with the XILINX compiler. The main objective of this contribution is to provide a method to develop EPICS IOCs based on FPGA devices in which the user has defined a specific functionality. A traditional DAQ system is based on a specific hardware with vendor-defined functionalities. Therefore, the EPICS devices support is implemented according to these fixed specifications. If another hardware model with different functionalities is selected, the user needs to modify the EPICS device support. On the contrary, IRIO provides an EPICS device support capable of connecting with any implementation in the FPGA if the user has followed a set of rules, named profiles. Using these rules the user can develop different implementations using various resources: DMA channels to move acquired data, registers for input/output operations, etc. The use of IRIO shorten the development cycle because the user only needs to design the specific application for the FPGA using LabVIEW for FPGA. The LabVIEW templates provided with IRIO offer solution to the most common task of the acquisition (data tampering, DMA transfers, IO Module initialization, …) allowing the developer to focus only in the application specific tasks. Once the user obtains the bitfile from this process, it only needs to create the IOC calling the provided IRIO Device Support based on asynDriver and instantiate the PV templates provided according with the resources implemented in the FPGA. Therefore, the integration with EPICS is reduced only to a configuration process eliminating the necessity of developing code for device supports. IRIO tools also contain additional software packages to implement EPICS device support using ITER Nominal Device Support (NDS) approach or standalone applications directly using the RIO devices without the intervention of EPICS. IRIO software tools are currently integrated in ITER CODAC Core System as the main component to develop applications for the cRIO and FlexRIO devices in the ITER fast controller catalog. IRIO is distributed with a GPL V2 license to other research facilities using EPICS or other users interested in the development of advanced data acquisition applications.

Presentation materials

Slides

UPMEPICSCM2016v5.pptx