A novel single chip implementation of MEMS INS data acquisition and processing system using FPGA and its soft processors

Traditional Inertial Navigation System uses Digital Signal Processor (DSP), Micro Control Unit (MCU) and FPGA to elaborate the data acquisition and processing system which is relatively complex to design, test and program. By using the soft processor and DSP block inside the FPGA, a novel single chip implementation which replaces the traditional DSP/MCU/FPGA solution with a single FPGA chip is described in this paper. The advantages of this method include the reduction of the volume, power consumption, and hardware complexity of the system. The single FPGA implementation can easily achieve high navigation update rate up to 10 kHz, or even higher, and can synchronize the different channel to nanosecond. It also allows more flexible modification of error compensation and navigation algorithm.