Embedded data acquisition system with MDSPlus

This data acquisition system (DAS) is designed and developed to cater the increasing demand of Plasma Diagnostics for Aditya Tokamak as well as to support the basic physics research going on at Institute for Plasma Research. The main design criteria were to design a system with minimum resources and flexible to cater the needs of slow and fast diagnostic channels and can be easily integrated with the existing data acquisition system of Aditya Tokamak The DAS is designed on embedded PC/104 platform. This is a multi channel system which supports standard features of commercially available DAS. The control and bus interface logic are implemented using Very High Speed Hardware Description Language (VHDL) on Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD). For Aditya Tokamak pulse experiment, the software application is designed such that the data is directly integrated to the MDSplus tree of Aditya DAS. The detailed hardware and software design, development and testing results will be discussed in the paper. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.