INTERFACING EPICS IOC AND LABVIEW FOR FPGA ENABLED COTS HARDWARE

Several attempts have been made to integrate EPICS functionality with National Instruments LabVIEW. With existing EPICS code, labs want to reuse the code while still being able to use LabVIEW to interface with FPGA enabled embedded controllers and other COTS hardware. In this paper, we will show how we can run EPICS IOC simultaneously with LabVIEW on VxWorks based hardware. We will go into the implementation details and the benchmarks that will be obtained from the LANSCE-R project at Los Alamos National Labs. We will also examine ways to implement a Channel Access(CA) server natively in LabVIEW. This will open up the opportunity to use a variety of IO and different operating systems that LabVIEW can interface with. The native LabVIEW CA server will implement all Channel Access functionality exposed by a standard EPICS IOC such as synchronous and asynchronous publishing of data, alarm processing, and response to connection requests by CA clients. We will finally cover the programming of FPGA allowing for custom solutions. Several attempts have been made to integrate EPICS functionality with National Instruments LabVIEW. Notably, the Spallation Neutron Source implemented a shared memory based interface that allows LabVIEW to interface directly with an EPICS IOC [1]. GSI implemented LabVIEW and EPICS DIM interfaces to allow the two execution systems to interact [2] [3]. These solutions provide various levels of interaction between LabVIEW and EPICS entities, but many users have expressed interest in a more integrated solution that allows LabVIEW VIs to interact directly with EPICS networks. To this end, we propose the inclusion of