Methodologies for implementing FPGA-based control systems

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an exponential growth in the complexity and performance of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This has lead to high adoption of FPGAs in embedded applications, such as consumer electronics, medical devices, and microelectromechanical system. Due to the FPGAs attractive features, choosing FPGAs as a control systems deployment platform is also spreading. This paper presents a number of development techniques for systematically implementing FPGA-based control systems. These techniques are applied towards developing a basic control systems building block, the transfer function. Additionally, a design cycle that is inspired by the "Design by Emulation" approach for digital control, is introduced for implementing general-purpose FPGA-based control systems. A case study is presented to demonstrate the application of the proposed methodologies towards an observerbased position motion control system. © 2011 IFAC.