Development of a Smart Motion Control Card with an IEEE-1394 Interface

IEEE 1394 is a high-efficiency communication network to guarantee timely data transmission and perform excellent network interconnection. In this paper, an IEEE-1394-based smart motion control card is presented, which is constructed by the hardware structure of the combination of a digital signal processor (DSP) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The former DSP module implements an IEEE-1394 controller, a servo controller and memory mapping for FPGA access, while the FPGA module is utilized to achieve the logical functions containing quadrature-encoder-pulse (QEP) circuit, feedback count, direction decoder, addressing mapping, DAC pre-processing circuit and I/O interface. For real-time communication, an ISA/IEEE-1394 interface board for the host is designed and the Ardence Real-time Extension (RTX) is adopted for deterministic control of Windows XP-based systems. As a meaningful attempt, an experimental platform is established to evaluate the communication performance of the IEEE-1394 interface. The experimental results show excellent real-time communication performance, which demonstrates the feasible application of the IEEE 1394 interface for distributed motion control systems.