| |
A soft core processor is a flexible hardware description language (HDL) model of a specific processor (CPU) that can be customized for a given application and synthesized for an FPGA as opposed to a hard core processor which is fixed in silicon. Combined with an on-board ethernet port, the technology incorporates integrating the IOC and digital control hardware within a single FPGA thus reducing the overall hardware complexities of field devices. In this paper, the technical details of porting EPICS Channel Access Server on MicroBlaze soft-core processor are explained. The EPICS performance on the Microblaze processor is analyzed. For this, the CPU load and server processing time for different numbers of Process Variables (PVs) have been studied for this platform. On the basis of the analysis, critical parameters of EPICS on this embedded platform have been derived and a few modifications in the channel access protocol are proposed for MicroBlaze soft-core processor.
|
|
