Real-time performance improvement approach based on FPGA in OFDR system

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to accelerate the data processing rate in optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) system. In conventional solution, data is sampled by data acquisition card and then sent to personal computer (PC) for data processing through high-speed interface such as peripheral component interconnect express (PCIE) and so on. But frequently-used general laptop can’t provide this interface. What’s more, long time is necessary to complete the calculation in PC due to the limitations of serial processing in central processing unit (CPU). To improve the real-time performance of OFDR system, in our work, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is used as hardware circuit to complete the calculation task and then send the results to PC only to display through universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) interface in the OFDR system simultaneously. In this way, the refresh rate of output can be accelerated about 50 times, which means the real-time performance of the system is improved a lot.