Data Acquisition with FPGA Using Xilinx and LabVIEW

This paper describes the concept of serial communication using LabVIEW software. Serial communication itself means to establish a communication between a host computer and a programmable device. Serial communication is democratic as most of the computers have one or more serial ports which dilute the usage of extra hardware other than a cable to connect the instrument and the computer. At a time one data bit is send during serial communication. Entire system constitutes of three parts: Xilinx software, programmable device, and LabVIEW software. Xilinx software is mainly used for creating UART communication code in VHDL. Programmable device is used to dump UART code. Logics and programmable blocks have been applied in LabVIEW for communication between host computer and programmable device. A programmable device utilized in the proposed system is FPGA of Spartan family, specifically used Spartan 3.