Design of an FPGA based intelligence traffic light controller with VHDL

Abstract

Traffic lights, which may also be known as stoplights, traffic lamps, traffic signals, stop-and-go lights robots or semaphore are signaling devices positioned at road intersections, pedestrian crossings and other locations to control competing flows of traffic[1]. Traffic lights assign the right of way to road users by the use of lights in standard colors. Traffic light controller establishes a set of rules and instructions that drivers, pilots, train engineers, and ship captains rely on to avoid collisions and other hazards. Traffic control systems include signs, lights and other devices that communicate specific directions, warnings, or requirements. Traffic light controller (TLC) has been implemented using microcontroller, FPGA, and ASIC design. FPGA has many advantages over microcontroller, some of these advantages are; the speed, number of input/output ports and performance which are all very important in TLC design, at the same time ASIC design is more expensive than FPGA. Most of the TLCs implemented on FPGA are simple ones that have been implemented as examples of FSM(Finite State Machine). This paper concerned with an FPGA design implementation of a low cost 24-hour advanced traffic light controller system. The system has been successfully tested and implemented in hardware using Xilinx Spartan 3E and Virtex 5 FPGA. But the sensor and camera interfacing(which remains as future scope) is not done yet, manually the data corresponding to the sensors were given. The system has many advantages over the exciting TLC's on most of the parts of the world[2].