In this EDM (Electrical Discharge Machining) application, a 6U VMEbus single-board computer based on the MPC8245 PowerPC® is used to control the axles and to supervise and display the operation of CNC-based sinking or wire electro erosion machines. Electrical Discharge Machining is the technique used in industry for high-precision machining of all types of conductive materials like metals, alloys, graphite, ceramics, etc. of any hardness. It describes the process of stripping off material using a successive series of electrical discharges at short intervals.

The A12 single-board computer used offers DRAM, Flash and CompactFlash® memory, dual Fast Ethernet, 4 COMs, USB, IDE and keyboard/mouse interfaces as well as an optional onboard hard disk. The CPU board has room for three PC-MIPs which offer all kinds of additional compute I/O functions. One of the PC-MIP® slots in this application is used to provide a part of the control systems that visualize the operation of the machines with graphics. The frame buffer interface offers a resolution up to 1280x1024 pixels and various video output options.

With the obsolence of the graphics controller on the first PC-MIP® came the task to replace the graphics function by another PC-MIP® without touching the configuration of the single-board computer itself. In order to guarantee long-term availability for the complete system, the new PC-MIP® is exclusively based on an FPGA. Thus the graphics capabilities required by the application could be mapped on IP cores. Exisiting software efforts could be saved and new functional requirements can be flexibly added at any time. In addition, the new FPGA-based PC-MIP® features unique functions like byte-swapping with little and big endian support which allows to use PowerPC® as well as Intel® architectures. Further possible FPGA extensions could be video compression, 3D algorithms, test pattern generators, and even a combination with non-grahics functions like digital I/O, field bus interfaces etc.