The diploma thesis presents the development of an emulator of an application-specific
integrated circuit MIS53 or MIS56. The circuit is used in connection with absolute
position encoders. In addition to the MIS circuit, the encoder system also consists of
a microcontroller and a magnetic ring.
The MIS53 or MIS56 circuit (differs only in number of Hall sensors) is based on Hall
sensors that convert ring magnetization data into voltage data, which is then
transformed to the position data.
The microcontroller processes, converts and transmits the data obtained from the MIS
circuit to the device that communicates with it. The software running on these
microcontrollers (firmware) is developed for the mentioned functionalities. The
development of firmware also includes its testing. Testing programs on such a system
requires the preparation of a test environment together with the preparation of the
magnetic ring and the MIS circuit. Since the operation of the MIS circuit is sensitive
and influenced by many factors, an emulator was developed to emulate its operation.
The emulator was realized on the Red Pitaya development board. It served as the basis
for the implementation of both, the digital logic in the FPGA part as well as the
program code in the processor part of the chip. An expansion board will be further
developed, which will allow a real emulation of the operation of the MIS circuit,
however, it has not been developed yet at the time of writing the thesis.
The development of the emulator presented in the thesis will facilitate the testing of
programs running on microcontrollers and eliminate both the MIS circuit and the
magnetic ring from the encoder testing system. With the emulator, firmware
developers will significantly simplify the testing. They will obtain a repeatable and
reliable pattern of emulation of the rotation of the magnetized ring, and therefore be
able to speed up the testing.
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