An FPGA-Based System on Chip for the Measurement of QCM Sensors Resolution

This paper describes the design of an FPGA-based SoC system intended to measure the mass resolution of quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) sensors. The implemented system integrates the frequency measurement and the computation of the sensor resolution in a single FPGA to configure a standalone measurement system. A Virtex-4 FPGA from Xilinx was chosen as hardware platform due to its suitable architecture to support SoC and DSP applications. The developed measurement system combines the 32-bit embedded MicroBlazereg soft processor with a specific hardware coprocessor designed to accelerate the computations required for real-time processing. A data flow based on techniques as recursive formulas and jump prediction was proposed in order to reduce the computations and memory requirements of the coprocessor. Finally, the implemented system was validated with a 9 MHz QCM sensor in damping media used for electrochemical applications and the results were compared with a full floating point implementation