A control system using ASICs technology for industrial environments

One of the most important aspects in the industrial world today, is distributed control and a certain hierarchical platform which could solve and manage this kind of industrial installation. In this article we pretend to show a developed system for a private company with a custom protocol and communication system but for industrial reasons this application is kept confidential. For this control system two different application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) have been developed, that have been partially supported by GAME. We describe the design methodology (synthesis, high-level design and macrocell integration) based on the hardware description language Verilog, and the communication protocol for this application. We put special attention on the communication module and the CRC circuit and the advantages that this technology, ASICs, provides to this kind of environment. This system has been developed and designed by SIDSA and the University of Valencia. This article introduces the system design and implementation, and it doesn't point to any particular application or installation. The system developed could be adapted to any industrial environment with just programming the central unit, based on 8051 microcontroller for any control application using its hard time protocol mechanism with cyclic redundant check for communication error detection.