The Implementation of Real-Time Plasma Electron Density Calculation Based on FPGA for Tokamak Devices

A hydrogen cyanide laser interferometer is mostly used to measure the plasma electron density in many Tokamak devices. The real-time calculation system of the plasma electron density based on a field-programmable gate array is proposed in this work. An Altera EP4CE30F23C8 FPGA chip is selected as the master chip, and an AD9238 chip of 10 MSps is employed for analog-to-digital conversion. The FPGA-based adapted Fast Fourier Transform and the proposed processing algorithm are designed to obtain the plasma electron density. The calculated density is stored in the secure digital card and can also be transmitted to the plasma control system via Ethernet. The experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively obtain the plasma density. The maximum error range is from − 1 to 1 degree and the time resolution is 0.025 ms which is better than that of the convention method 0.1 ms. Meanwhile, this system is highly flexible and reduces design costs to meet the demands of Tokamak devices.