FPGA BASED OPC UA EMBEDDED INDUSTRIAL DATA SERVER IMPLEMENTATION

Abstract

Contemporary computer systems used in the industry are characterized by both an increase in the scale of supported industrial processes measured by the number of control devices and the increasing demand for information describing the underlying processes measured by the number of tags used in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES). Classical industrial data servers based on the PC architecture are unreliable, expensive to operate and difficult to manage. The alternative is a new standard OPC UA communication interface that simplifies the communication protocol and increases the flexibility of the process data description which allow for the direct implementation of OPC UA servers in embedded devices. This paper presents an innovative approaches in the field of industrial data servers which are used for communication between control systems and SCADA or MES systems. The prototype industrial data server architecture has been implemented, run and tested on the platform of embedded system based on FPGA matrix with built-in FPGA Microblaze processor. The presented experimental results allow to evaluate the applicability of the proposed solution, the limits of the presented architecture and may be used for the improvement of the embedded industrial data servers' structure in subsequent implementations.