Reconfigurable Platform to implement Electronic Instrumentation

This paper presents a reconfigurable platform facilitating the implementation of electronic instrumentation in a flexible way and with a low cost. This platform consists of hardware and software. The hardware is composed of two cards, one with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and a universal serial bus (USB) controller and another with the conditioning and converting circuits. The software consists of a dynamic link library (DLL) controlling the hardware functionalities in order to facilitate the software development and the data interchange between instruments configured in the hardware and the PC programs. An application that implements a data acquisition system (DAS) is presented.