FPGA Design Methodology for Industrial Control Systems—A Review

This paper reviews the state of the art of field- programmable gate array (FPGA) design methodologies with a focus on industrial control system applications. This paper starts with an overview of FPGA technology development, followed by a presentation of design methodologies, development tools and relevant CAD environments, including the use of portable hardware description languages and system level programming/design tools. They enable a holistic functional approach with the major advantage of setting up a unique modeling and evaluation environment for complete industrial electronics systems. Three main design rules are then presented. These are algorithm refinement, modularity, and systematic search for the best compromise between the control performance and the architectural constraints. An overview of contributions and limits of FPGAs is also given, followed by a short survey of FPGA-based intelligent controllers for modern industrial systems. Finally, two complete and timely case studies are presented to illustrate the benefits of an FPGA implementation when using the proposed system modeling and design methodology. These consist of the direct torque control for induction motor drives and the control of a diesel-driven synchronous stand-alone generator with the help of fuzzy logic.

I. Introduction

Fast progress of very large scale integration (VLSI) technology and electronic design automation (EDA) techniques in recent years has created an opportunity for the development of complex and compact high-performance controllers for industrial electronic systems [1]. Nowadays, the design engineer is using modern EDA tools to create, simulate, and verify a design and, without committing to hardware, can quickly evaluate complex systems and ideas with very high confidence in the “right first time” correct operation of the final product.