Adaptive embedded digital system for plasma diagnostics

An Adaptive Embedded Digital System to perform plasma diagnostics using electrostatic probes was developed at the Plasma Engineering Laboratory at Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. The system will replace the existing instrumentation at the Laboratory, using reconfigurable hardware to minimize the equipment and software needed to perform diagnostics. The adaptability of the design resides on the possibility of replacing the computational algorithm on the fly, allowing to use the same hardware for different probes. The system was prototyped using Very High Speed Integrated Circuits Hardware Description Language (VHDL) into an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. The design of the Embedded Digital System includes a Zero Phase Digital Filter, a Derivative Unit, and a Computational Unit designed using the VHDL-2008 Support Library. The prototype is able to compute the Plasma Electron Temperature and Density from a Single Langmuir probe. The system was tested using real data previously acquired from a single Langmuir probe. The plasma parameters obtained from the embedded system were compared with results computed using matlab yielding excellent matching. The new embedded system operates on 4096 samples versus 500 on the previous system, and completes its computations in 26 milliseconds compared with about 15 seconds on the previous system.