Design of ZYNQ-Based Airborne Flight Data Acquisition Unit

The airborne flight data acquisition unit is an essential part of an aircraft, designed to collect and record important flight data, including key parameters related to the aircraft's flight and system status. This information is critical for future aircraft state assessments, performance evaluations, and fault diagnostics. With the growing variety and volume of airborne data buses, current data acquisition units show inconsistent performance regarding airborne bus types, online processing capabilities, storage efficiency, and data offloading speed, which restricts their usability. As a result, these units need possess features such as multi-bus support, rapid processing, and large storage capacity. To ensure accurate and comprehensive flight data collection, this paper outlines the design of a new airborne data acquisition unit. This unit utilizes a Zynq SoC processor model ZU4EV, which offers significant computing power. It can gather flight data from RS-232, RS-422, and 1553B interfaces, while employing a PCIe-based M.2 interface for data storage and analysis on a high-capacity onboard SSD, and using an Ethernet interface for data offloading. Testing of the interfaces, data path functionality, and performance has confirmed that the airborne data acquisition unit can effectively collect, analyze, store, and offload flight data while ensuring its accuracy and completeness.