A high-performance pipelined architecture for measurement and monitoring of multiple sensor signals

A high-performance pipelined architecture with hardware sharing for measurement and monitoring of signals generated by sensors that measure physical quantities is presented. Pipelining provides the necessary computational power and has potential for minimizing the input sampling to output monitoring delay, while hardware sharing results in a lower cost. The three segments in the pipeline are: sample acquisition, sample processing, and output monitoring. Each segment is implemented using one or more microprocessors. Various considerations involved in the design of a pipelined architecture are discussed, and a simple model to predict the computing power required and the maximum delay incurred for an application is presented