Refractometer Image Processing Accelerator
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Sähkötekniikan korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
Authors
Date
2022-03-21
Department
Major/Subject
Micro- and Nanoelectronic Circuit Design
Mcode
ELEC3036
Degree programme
Master’s Programme in Electronics and Nanotechnology (TS2013)
Language
en
Pages
60 + 67
Series
Abstract
There has been a clear increasing trend of production demand in manufacturing industries, which has facilitated the adoption of in-line process instrumentation. One such area where in-line instruments are widely utilized is solution concentration measurement. In particular an optical measurement device called a refractometer is used. In-line refractometers require repeated computation to be performed on relatively large one-dimensional image data. This becomes a problem for a Micro-Controller Unit (MCU) based designs running at low clock frequencies. Therefore, a design of FPGA-based refractometer image processing accelerator is proposed, which can off-load the task of image related computation from MCU. Based on the refractometer requirements a VHDL description of the accelerator is written, simulated, synthesized and implemented on a Lattice Semiconductor's iCE40 family FPGA. Statistics of the implementation are collected, and timing and power consumption analysis are performed. Additionally, the functionality of accelerator is tested by putting it through a standard calibration and comparing the theoretical gained accuracy with a reference refractometer specification. Resulting accelerator design is shown to exceed the speed of existing software implementation at equivalent clock frequencies, while maintaining the specified accuracy. Finally, possible improvements and future work is discussed.Description
Supervisor
Ryynänen, JussiThesis advisor
Chen, LiangyuKeywords
refractometer, accelerator, FPGA, embedded systems, VHDL, process instrumentation