Distributed Real-Time Data Acquisition and Control Systems using
Power-PC and High Speed Interconnections

François-Henri WORM

Creative Electronic Systems - Switzerland


This paper will present a state of the art architecture developed to realize large scale distributed data acquisition and control systems with a modular architecture using open standards:

1. VME bus is used as the backbone bus within the different control units.

2. PCI is used as a local subsystem.

3. PowerPC processors are used to provide the computing elements at two levels :

- Function control : I/O processors (RIO2 8060) to control I/Os on VME, VSB bus and PMC interface cards.
- System control : In every unit, I/O controllers are surveyed by a system controller -RTPC 8067- which controls and analyzes the data flow before transmitting the relevant data to the real-time network.

4. Inter unit connection occurs either through FDDI (5 Mbytes/s), ATM (10 Mbytes/s) or FDL (50 Mbytes/s) according to the system requirements.

5. The complete systems is operated under LYNX-OS with self-hosted development on some of the system controllers, diskless development being carried in the other RTPC 8067s via VME or FDL backplane drivers, and embedded applications in the Flash EPROM's of the I/O controllers.

The pros and cons of this architecture compared with proprietary architectures will be discussed.