This paper presents a fixed-point reconfigurable parallel VLSI hardware architecture for real-time Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT). It is modular and consists of a front-end module which performs precise capacitance measurements in a time multiplexed manner using Capacitance to Digital Converter (CDC) technique. Another FPGA module performs the inverse steps of the tomography algorithm. A dual port built-in memory banks store the sensitivity matrix, the actual value of the capacitances, and the actual image. A two dimensional (2D) core multiprocessing elements (PE) engine intercommunicates with these memory banks via parallel buses. A Hardware-software codesign methodology was conducted using commercially available tools in order to concurrently tune the algorithms and hardware parameters. Hence, the hardware was designed down to the bit-level in order to reduce both the hardware cost and power consumption, while satisfying real-time constraint. Quantization errors were assessed against the image quality and bit-level simulations demonstrate the correctness of the design. Further simulations indicate that the proposed architecture achieves a speed-up of up to three orders of magnitude over the software version when the reconstruction algorithm runs on 2.53 GHZ-based Pentium processor or DSP Ti's Delphino TMS320F32837 processor. More specifically, a throughput of 17.241 Kframes/sec for both the Linear-Back Projection (LBP) and modified Landweber algorithms and 8.475 Kframes/sec for the Landweber algorithm with 200 iterations could be achieved. This performance was achieved using an array of [2×2] × [2×2] processing units. This satisfies the real-time constraint of many industrial applications. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first embedded system which explores the intrinsic parallelism which is available in modern FPGA for ECT tomography.Index Terms -ECT, FPGA, matrix multiplication decomposition. 0018-9340 (c)

Accuracy comparison of various time domain methods for locating of partial discharge (PD) in power cables is presented in this paper. The PD location is based on the measurement from two-end of the cable. The defect in the cable is located from the arrival time interval between the initial waves of a PD pulse. To estimate the time-of arrival, various methods such as peak detection, 50% pulse peak detection, threshold detection, Akaike Information Criterion, Energy Criterion, Gabor Centroid, and cross correlation are considered. The computer simulation has been carried out using a 20 kV, 1000-m underground cable. After comparison, it is found that peak detection has better performance than other methods.

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