This book serves as a practical guide for practicing engineers who need to design embedded systems for high-speed data acquisition and control systems. A minimum amount of theory is presented, along with a review of analog and digital electronics, followed by detailed explanations of essential topics in hardware design and software development. The discussion of hardware focuses on microcontroller design (ARM microcontrollers and FPGAs), techniques of embedded design, high speed data acquisition (DAQ) and control systems. Coverage of software development includes main programming techniques, culminating in the study of real-time operating systems. All concepts are introduced in a manner to be highly-accessible to practicing engineers and lead to the practical implementation of an embedded board that can be used in various industrial fields as a control system and high speed data acquisition system.

This book describes the fundamentals of data acquisition systems, how they enable users to sample signals that measure real physical conditions and convert the resulting samples into digital, numeric values that can be analyzed by a computer. The author takes a problem-solving approach to data acquisition, providing the tools engineers need to use the concepts introduced. Coverage includes sensors that convert physical parameters to electrical signals, signal conditioning circuitry to convert sensor signals into a form that can be converted to digital values and analog-to-digital converters, which convert conditioned sensor signals to digital values. Readers will benefit from the hands-on approach, culminating with data acquisition projects, including hardware and software needed to build data acquisition systems.

This book addresses several issues related to the metrological characterization of high-performance pulsed power converters. Initially, a background and state-of-the-art on measurement systems for high-performance power converter are presented. In industrial applications of power converters metrology, specifications are often given in terms of worst-case uncertainty (WCU). Therefore, an analytical model for predicting the WCU of a measurement system is discussed and detailed for instruments affected by Gaussian noise. The authors discuss the study and design of a reference acquisition system for characterizing high-power pulses as well as the design of an on-line acquisition system for controlling the power converter. The book continues with numerical results obtained in simulation for the three main topics, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposals. Finally, the experimental results of a case study, carried out in the framework of the Compact Linear Collider (CLIC) at CERN, are reported. To meet CLIC requirements the two systems were designed to be ultra-low noise and are demonstrated to be repeatable in the order of few tens of parts per million (ppm).