the gluion, advantages of an FPGA-based sensor interface

The gluion is a sensor interface that was designed to overcome some of the limitations of more traditional designs based on microcontrollers, which only provide a small, fixed number of digital modules such as counters and serial interfaces. These are often required to handle sensors where the physical parameter cannot easily be converted into a voltage. Other sensors are packed into modules that include converters and communicate via SPI or I2C. Finallly, many designs require output capabilities beyond simple on/off. The gluion approaches these challenges thru its FPGA-based design which allows for a large number of digital I/O modules. It also provides superior flexibility regarding their configuration, resolution, and functionality. In addition, the FPGA enables a software implementation of the host link in the case of the gluion the OSC protocol as well as the underlying Ethernet layers.