Real time control system architecture for industrial electron beam welding facility based on FPGA

Abstract

Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics produces electron beam welding facilities (EBWF), which are successfully utilized in experiments and low series production (e.g. manufacturing of vacuum chambers for the FAIR project). For the joint quality, it is crucial to deflect the electron beam in sync with the welded sample movement. We present the real-time control system architecture, that consists of a CPU-based high-level programmable interface, and real-time control logic implemented in FPGA. FPGA system consists of synchronized subsystems running simultaneously - execution of specialized programs to control electron beam deflection, coordinate table movement, and also processing image data gathered from secondary electron emission detector. To reduce the labor needed for implementation, the image processing subsystem is written in high-level domain-specific language Caph, thus the resulting image processing VHDL code is autogenerated.