Development of RPS trip logic based on PLD technology

Abstract

The majority of instrumentation and control (I&C) systems in today's nuclear power plants (NPPs) are based on analog technology. Thus, most existing I&C systems now face obsolescence problems. Existing NPPs have difficulty in repairing and replacing devices and boards during maintenance because manufacturers no longer produce the analog devices and boards used in the implemented I&C systems. Therefore, existing NPPs are replacing the obsolete analog I&C systems with advanced digital systems. New NPPs are also adopting digital I&C systems because the economic efficiencies and usability of the systems are higher than the analog I&C systems. Digital I&C systems are based on two technologies: a microprocessor based system in which software programs manage the required functions and a programmable logic device (PLD) based system in which programmable logic devices, such as field programmable gate arrays, manage the required functions. PLD based systems provide higher levels of performance compared with microprocessor based systems because PLD systems can process the data in parallel while microprocessor based systems process the data sequentially. In this research, a bistable trip logic in a reactor protection system (RPS) was developed using very high speed integrated circuits hardware description language (VHDL), which is a hardware description language used in electronic design to describe the behavior of the digital system. Functional verifications were also performed in order to verify that the bistable trip logic was designed correctly and satisfied the required specifications. For the functional verification, a random testing technique was adopted to generate test inputs for the bistable trip logic.