Field Programmable Gate Array based Simultaneous Temperature- Visualization on Video Graphics Array Monitor for Multi-Sensor Data Acquisition System

The present paper depicts visualization of temperatures on Video Graphics Array (VGA) monitor; using no central processing units (CPUs). It displays the temperatures sensed by multiple sensors, concurrently. Instead of reading the physical parameters on numerical display panels, or observing those on a personnel computer (PC) based system; the instrumentation was developed in such a way that, temperatures were displayed in the form of bar graphs on VGA monitor. The number of such strips indicates various data acquisition systems built around a single Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip. Different Soft Intellectual Property (IP) Cores were implemented in the Xilinx FPGA, Spartan 3E device, to drive 12 bit serial Analogue to Digital Converters (ADCs) and a VGA monitor; having 480 by 640 pixels resolution. Two AD7991 boards were interfaced with the FPGA chip; providing necessary signals for the Inter IC (I2C) serial communication protocol. Each degree centigrade (°C) of the temperature was scaled to 4 pixels on vertical axis, meaning thereby, a 30°C was represented by 120 (30x4) pixels; illuminating vertically on the VGA monitor. A growth of one °C increases row address by the figure of 4, maintaining the column address on VGA monitor.