Serial-to-ethernet converter

TASC Systems Inc. requires Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communications between their remote monitoring hardware and software run on the user’s local work station. The Serial-to-Ethernet Converter receives serial (RS232) data from the remote monitoring hardware and sends it to the monitoring software on t he user’s local work station via Ethernet and vice versa. It is implemented using Xilinx’s Spartan 3A FPGA with Xilinx’s MicroBlaze soft processor and Ethernet MAC. The hardware is designed using Xilinx’s EDK software and the Serial-to-Ethernet software utilizes the open source lightweight Internet Protocol (lwIP) TCP/IP stack along with Xilinx’s Xilkernel multithreaded kernel.