Linearizing thermistor characteristics by piecewise linear interpolation in real time FPGA

This paper describes FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) implementation of piecewise linear interpolation method for linearization of a nonlinear thermistor characteristic. The known data points of the nonlinear thermistor characteristic are interpolated to determine the unknown points in the range. The value of an unknown intermediate point is determined by using a straight line equation between the nearest two known data points. The interpolation technique is implemented in FPGA Spartan-III for linearization of nonlinear thermistor characteristic for real time applications. In this method fixed point arithmetic is used for data representation and calculation in FPGA.