CCFE: Plasma Imaging

Xilinx FPGA’s “blistering speed” enables acquisition of 4GB of data in a half second.

A key part of fusion research is the real-time measurement of the fusion plasma. Each diagnostic has its own requirements. Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) researchers have developed a diagnostic that images microwaves emitted from the plasma in order to measure the electrical current within it. For that purpose, they set out to design a synthetic-aperture imaging system.

Synthetic-aperture imaging uses phased arrays of antennas. The radio frequency (RF) system down-converts the frequency of the signal at each antenna, from 6 to 40 GHz, for a 250-MHz bandwidth signal. In total, CCFE had to acquire 4 Gbytes of data in half a second. To accomplish this, CCFE included two Xilinx boards in the system and leveraged the PC-like interface of the company’s MicroBlaze soft processor.

Thankfully, Xilinx then pushed out the AXI4 interconnect and memory controller, giving full access to the whole 64 bits at 400 MHz double data rate (800 million transactions per second). That effectively gave a throughput of 6.4 Gbytes/s—a truly blistering speed that exceeded our requirement of 4 Gbytes/s on each board. This was exactly what we needed.

- Billy Huang, PhD Researcher, Durham University/CCFE
- Dr. Roddy Vann, Assistant Professor, University of York
- Dr. Graham Naylor, Head of MAST Plasma Diagnostics and Control, CCFE
- Dr. Vladimir Shevchenko, Senior Physicist, CCFE
- Simon Freethy, PhD Researcher, University of York/CCFE

Additional Information

Read the full story, Battling a Star Using ARM’s AXI4 in an FPGA, in Xcell Journal, Issue 76

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CCFE: Plasma Imaging

Xilinx FPGA’s “blistering speed” enables acquisition of 4GB of data in a half second.

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