Optical fiber sensor system design utilizing the field programmable gate array

This paper presents the design of a system that is aimed to provide a flexible, portable and low cost solution for optical fiber based sensor systems. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) provides the digital logic to implement the system and ability to reconfigure the system operation. It aims to support different optical fiber sensing requirements by the ability to reconfigure the digital circuitry used. It is therefore a hardware configured alternative to a software programmed processor based approach. The work discussed in this paper focuses on the architecture of the FPGA based system with additional circuitry to implement the light source using a light emitting diode (LED), sensor signal sampling using a photodiode and the digital functions implemented using the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. The system also includes serial communications to an external computer that allows the system to be used as part of a larger sensor network. In this paper, system control and sensor data visualization on a personal computer (PC) is undertaken using the Python open source programming language.