Design of a Data Acquisition System for USB Devices over Gigabit Ethernet

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is one of the most widespread technical innovations in personal computer and home consumer applications over the past few years. Keyboards, mouse devices, printers, webcams, and several other computer peripherals are available with this type of connection. This success is due to some bus characteristics, such as simplicity, plug & play features, hot plug support, and, particularly, the possibility of supplying power to the devices. USB offers good noise immunity due to its differential type signal transmission. The high data transfer rate of USB interface makes it a suitable choice for data acquisition and processing. This paper proposes a system which acquires data from multiple USB devices simultaneously and transfers this data at the speed of Gigabits per second to PCs connected to the LAN network. This system shall act as an interface between the USBs and the PCs. As the FPGA provides a high level of flexibility and also contains a number of modules on chip, which can operate independently, and at very high speeds, this data acquisition system shall have FPGA chip as the main processing unit. General Terms IEEE 802.3 protocol, MAC Core, Xilinx Platform Studio, LAN