Design and implementation of CNC controllers using reconfigurable hardware

The reconfigurable hardware has been widely applied in Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) systems. The reconfigurable hardware provides high performance and flexibilities for the designer. This work presented a novel CNC controller architecture using reconfigurable hardware. Several logic modules, including a new resampling module for threading, are designed to support the reconfiguration process. By employing different type of logic modules, the hardware logic of the controller can be changed to control various targets. An experimental system was built, and applied to a milling machine and a lathe machine to valid the proposed architecture.

I. Introduction

COMPUTER Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines are widely applied in modem industries. As the control center of the machine, the CNC controller affects the machining performance in many aspects, such as speed, precision and stability. With the rapid increment in machining speed and precision, the conventional software based CNC controllers are difficult to meet the computational demands. The reconfigurable hardware is introduced to solve this problem.