Abstract

In scientific facilities such as particle accelerators, fast and jitter-free synchronization is required in order to trigger a large number of actuators at the right time in a variety of situations. The behaviour of the control systems and subsystems may be specified by using statechart diagrams, which expand the capabilities of finite state machines allowing concurrency, a hierarchy of states, and history. Hence, there is a need of tools for synthesizing those diagrams so that a new control configuration may be deployed in a short time and an error-free manner in the required environments. In this work, we present a tool that analyses the specification of a variant of the State Chart XML (SCXML) standard tailored to hardware systems and produces a hardware description language (HDL) code suited to implement the required control systems using FPGAs. A number of solutions are provided to deal with the specific features of statecharts, such as multiple triggering events and concurrent super-states. We also present a microprogrammed architecture able to implement statecharts defined as firmware. Finally, we compare the advantages of each strategy in terms of usability, resource usage, and performance, and their applicability to a specific facility is evaluated.

Highlights

  • Hardware-based control systems are required in certain environments, when perfect synchronization is compulsory

  • In this work we present and compare the implementation of jitter-free synchronization in research facilities using two methods: a tool that allows the automated synthesis of hardware control systems based on graphical statechart descriptions and a microprogrammed architecture [1] for the same statechart

  • The statechart descriptions follow a constrained version of State Chart XML (SCXML) [2] tailored to hardware systems, and are compared to the implementations developed by a skilled engineer in terms of the generated code, and in relation to the ease and speed of support, maintainability and upgradability of those implementations in deployments with certain requirements such as research facilities

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Summary

Introduction

Hardware-based control systems are required in certain environments, when perfect synchronization is compulsory. In this work we present and compare the implementation of jitter-free synchronization in research facilities using two methods: a tool that allows the automated synthesis of hardware control systems based on graphical statechart descriptions and a microprogrammed architecture [1] for the same statechart. Statecharts were introduced by Harel in [4] as a tool to implement complex control systems, either in software or hardware. They may be seen as an extension of Finite State Machines (FSMs) that allow a clear specification of hierarchy and concurrency.

Statecharts
Hardwired Strategy
Statechart Parsing and Analysis from a Graphical Tool
Synthesis of Super-States
Orthogonality
History
Distributed Generation
Actions and Conditions
VHDL Implementation Steps
Microprogrammed Architecture
Evaluation
Conclusions
Full Text
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