LiSARD: LabVIEW Integrated Softcore Architecture for Reconfigurable Devices

The development of industrial control and measurement systems is often based on modular commercial off the-shelf hardware. Lately, for these platforms reconfigurable I/O modules with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) have gained significance, since they allow the implementation of data processing functionality very close to the data acquisition interfaces. However, algorithm complexity and floating-point support are limited by FGPA resources and design methods. This contribution presents an application specific configurable DSP soft core architecture built around a scalable double precision floating-point arithmetic/logic unit. The core can be seamlessly utilized as a functional component in Lab VIEW based FPGA designs. A small case study shows the performance of an example application implemented on the presented core in comparison to other embedded architectures.