A MicroBlaze-based Multiprocessor System on Chip for real-time cardiac monitoring

This paper is a try of contribution to explore and create embedded designs in the context of the MultiProcessor System on Chip (MPSoC) based on the state of the art Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), taking a case study and evaluation in the biomedical field. With this design approach, we have developed a Multiprocessor-based system for cardiac monitoring, with the Xilinx soft processor MicroBlaze. The Fast Simplex Link (FSL) bus is used as the mode of communication between the 3 MicroBlazes of this design. One processor is responsible of Human Machine Interface (HMI); another deals with Digital Signal Processing (DSP), and the third processor acts as the unique master that controls and coordinates the whole application software. Thus, the system permits, with success, the digitizing of the Electrocardiogram (ECG) analog signal, the displaying of heart rate (HR) on seven segments indicator, and the communication with a PC via the serial port for debugging and evaluation purposes. We have used the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database records to test and evaluate our implementation performance. The implementation occupies around 94% of the low-cost used FPGA, namely the Xilinx SPARTAN-6 XC6SLX16. The accuracy of the QRS detection, based on the well-known Pan and Tompkins algorithm, exceeds 96%.