FPGA Design Methodology for Industrial Control Systems—A Review
Summary (5 min read)
Introduction
- The 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.
- Three main design rules are then presented.
- Benefits of using portable Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) are discussed, then, the holistic approach is explained.
A. FPGA Generic Architecture Description
- FPGAs belong to the wide family of programmable logic components [4]-[8].
- Amongst them, only those which are reprogrammable (Flash, EPROM, SRAM) are of interest since they allow the same flexibility as that of a microprocessor.
- Therefore, the rest of the paper will discuss only the SRAM-based FPGA technology [6]-[7], by farthe most widespread [47].
- Also very interesting for control applications is the recent integration of an analog-to-digital converter in the Fusion comp nent from Actel [8].
- Their structures include 2, 4 or more logic cells, also called logic elements.
B. Hardware Description Languages and FPGAs
- Originally, FPGAs were only used to integrate glue-logic usually devoted to TTL basic logic circuits.
- System level modeling languages (such as Handel-C, System-C) and Hardware Description Languages (such as VHDL, Verilog) enable the underpinning mathematical description and the electronic design implementation o be simultaneously addressed in a unique environment, supported by a range of major Computer Aided Engineer g platforms.
- Ability to handle all levels of abstraction.
- Versatile reusable models / design modules are generated, in accordance with modern principles of design reuse.
- A modern hardware-in-the-loop testing approach is also facilitated by this environment, allowing effective testing of circuit designs.
IV. FPGA-BASED CONTROLLER DESIGN RULES
- FPGA technology allows developing specific hardware architectures within a flexible programmable environment.
- This specific feature of the FPGAs gives designers a new degree of freedom comparing to microprocessor implementations, since the hardware architecture of the control system is not imposed a priori.
- In many cases, the development of this architecture is rathe intuitive and not adapted to the implementation of more and more complex algorithms.
- Such a methodology rests on three main principles: the control algorithm refinement, the modularity and the best suitability between the algorithm to implement and the chosen hardware architecture.
A. Algorithm refinement
- Algorithm refinement is a necessary step when designing with FPGAs.
- Amongst the most commonly used techniques of simplification, CORDIC can be mentioned, an acronym for COordinate Rotation DIgital Computer [64].
- Another interesting family of algorithms is the distributed arithmetic one [65], that can make extensive use of look-up tables (LUTs), which makes it ideal for implementing DSP functions in LUT-based FPGAs.
- Besides, during the conversion process, the designer can also simplify the implemented equations with an adequate choice of scale factors [34].
- In the digital signal processing domain, the most common used criterion for evaluating the fixed-point specification accuracy is the Signal-to-Quantization-Noise-Ratio (SQNR).
B. Design methodology based on reuse modules
- For complex designs, modular conception is generally used to reduce the design cycle.
- This methodology is based on hierarchy and regularity concepts.
- Therefore, the reus methodology consists in selecting, throughout the synthesis process, elements of a library that are useful for the design in progress.
- These modules, extracted of the design flow, are distributed between various levels of abstraction.
- The procedure is very similar to those used in DSP developments, with soft-macros [72].
C. Algorithm Architecture “Adequation” Methodology
- In many cases, desired modules do not already exist and they have to be built.
- The goal of the Algorithm Architecture “Adequation” (or A3 methodology), when applied to FPGAs, is to find outan optimized hardware architecture for a given application algorithm, while satisfying time/area constraints [73].
- “Adequation” is a French word meaning efficient matching.
- Notice that, for simplicity reason, only the transformation and computation parts of this algorithm have been tr ated in this example.
- Then, the different data-paths are compared taking into account their performance in terms of latency, speed and size area in order to get the best tradeoff between all these constraits.
A. Domain of use of the FPGAs
- When designing industrial electronics circuits, several criteria have to be considered.
- On the other hand, if the DFG reveals many possibilities of parallelism (low data dependency and competition betthe authors n operations), it is then the hardware solution which becomes the most interesting.
- Timing constraints are not sufficient to fully characterize an algorithm - its complexity is also a keyelement.
- In the field of digital control of electrical systems, algorithms are almost all included in the intersection area of these two technologies.
- According to us, the reason is historical.
B. Benefits of using FPGAs for Control of Electrical Systems
- As a complement of the former section, authors are now trying to outline the benefits of using FPGAs for cntrolling industrial electrical systems, driven by a power converter.
- Direct control of the power converters can be achieved but expected results are of less quality than those obtained via an analog controller.
- Due to their ability to transcript on the hardware architecture all the potential parallelisms of the control algorithm, FPGAs can only take a fraction of the switching period to execute in real-time a full complex algorithm.
- They preserve their advantages (no calculation delay, higher bandwidth) without their drawbacks (parameters drifting, poor level of integration).
- A more careful look at Fig. 9c, shows important time left within each sampling period, when the controller has finished its computing tasks and has only to handle the PWM signals generation.
C. Dynamic Reconfiguration of FPGAs
- Conversely, SRAM-based FPGAs allow dynamical reconfiguring of hardware architectures.
- This possibility has already been largely explored in computer vision applications [82].
- Authors had also experimented with success a first dynamically reconfigurable architecture dedicated to the tests of evolving PWM strategies [84].
- The dynamic reconfiguration of hardware configuration, which can be partial or total, is still largely underexploited in the field of industrial control systems.
- A major reason is the poor reconfiguration speed [7].
VI. FPGAS IN INTELLIGENT AND COMPLEX CONTROL SYSTEMS
- The use of modern Electronic Design Automation packages for electronic systems design facilitates ea y implementation of complex control algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) into hardware.
- Hence, a wide range of complex and intelligent controller designs have been recently developed, with applications in industry.
- A significant number of them target FPGAs, due to the rapid prototyping features and the flexibility offered byFPGAs, specially through the recent availability of microp cessor or DSP cores, allowing hardware software co-design and implementation.
- Some areas using FPGAs for the implementation of complex controllers are highlighted below and a case study of an AI (fuzzy logic) contrlle will be dealt with in more detail in a separate section.
A. Neural Networks implemented in FPGA
- Solutions should be tailored to the needs of industry by providing a choice of implementations from software modules, through FPGAs and semi-custom chips to full-custom VLSI.
- The following European companies are known to have investigated the use of hardware-based neural networks: Ericsson (UK, Sweden), Philips Research , Siemens (, UK), 3M Laboratories Europe GmbH Neuss, XIONICS Document Technologies GmbH Dortmund, Robert Bosch GmbH Reutlingen, Spectrum Microelectronics Siek , Fiat , Domain Dynamics Ltd (UK) [86].
- Specific application areas include the control of telecommunications networks, speech processing and recognition, speaker identification a d micro-electromechanical systems.
- The industry which already applies neural technology, or is likely to benefit from it, is already pan-European.
E. Evolvable hardware
- Evolvable hardware offers much for the future of complex system design.
- Evolutionary techniques not only give the potential to explore larger solution spaces, but when implemented on hardware allow system designs to adapt to changes in the environment, including failures in system components.
- Andy Tyrrell and his team at University of York, UK.
- The controller consists of look-up tables, which perform the mapping from sensor data to actuator, evolved using an effective evolutionary algorithm.
- The experimental results ona Khepera robot show that the method can successfully evolve a robot controller for autonomous navigation to avoid collision in an unknown or changing environment even if sensor faults occur prior to evolution or after a successful member of a population has been evolved. [104].
F. Controller designs for smart structural systems
- The design of controllers for smart structural systems usually proceeds without regard for their eventual implementation, thus resulting either in serious performance degradation or in hardware requirements that squander power, complicate integration and drive up cost.
- The level of integration assumed by the smart patch further exacerb tes these difficulties and any design inefficiency may render the realization of a single-package sensor-controller-actuator system infeasible.
- The research carried out automates the controller implementation process and relieves the design engineer of implementation concerns like quantization, computational efficiency and device selection.
- FPGAs are specifically targeted as a hardware platform because these devices are highly flexible, power efficient, and reprogrammable.
- The proposed controller design methodology is implemented on a simple cantilever bam test structure using FPGA hardware [105].
G. FPGAs used in Motion Control Interface
- New Ethernet-based FPGA-based controllers for motion control are reported [106].
- They include all hardware functions, such as timing, synchronisation and processing of cyclic and noncyclic data on the basis of two integrated Ethernet MACs.
- Cores for two controllers are available, based on the low-cost Spartan-3 Xilinx FPGA platform.
- The SERCON100 master and slave controllers are available, both integrated in a FT256 BGA housing so that a comm n hardware design can be realized.
- This makes a very powerful, low-cost standard hardware platform available, which reduces implementation efforts and also ensures a high acceptance by suppliers [106].
VII FPGA-BASED DTC CONTROLLER
- The authors present FPGA-based implementations of Direct Torque and Stator Flux Contr l (DTC) and Direct Torque and Rotor Flux Control with the use of Space Vector Modulation (SVM) for induction motor drives.
- Indeed, due to their similar structures but also their differences, these two alg rithms are good examples to show the effectiveness of an FPGA-based functional modular approach to implement sensorless control induction motor drives.
- These blocks are tested and organized in a library of Intellectual Property (IP) modules for easy re-use [107].
- A special attention is given to the algorithm refinement, which allows finding the optimum fixed-point data word length for each internal variable of the algorithm.
- Finally, experimental results are shown, which validate the proposed approach.
A. Principles of the proposed control algorithms
- DTC and SVM-DTRFC algorithms have high torque dynamic performances.
- In a first approximation, the SVMDTRFC algorithm can be considered as derived from the well-known DTC algorithm [108].
- While the basic DTC technique is to directly select stator voltage vectors according to the differences between reference and actual torque and between reference and stator flux linkage, SVMDTRFC strategy is based on torque and rotor flux control [109].
- Moreover, in this case the Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) is controlled indirectly by using SVM in a similar way with what was proposed in [110].
- This technique allows a smoother behavior of the torque regulation at steady-state operation than basic DTC.
B. Design of modular architectures
- The discretization of the normalized control algorithms is performed with the forward-difference (FD) approximation.
- As it can be seen from table I, there are several common blocks used by both control algorithms.
- As mentioned earlier, an interesting metric for evaluating the precision of the digital algorithms developed with fixedpoint arithmetic is the Signal to Quantization Noise Ratio (SQNR) [67].
- As an example, a set of evaluations performed with the α-axis stator flux estimator are described, for which the DFG is presented in Fig.12.
- The sampling frequency is fixed to 20KHZ.
C. Experimental results
- Experiments are carried out with a 1kW, 4 poles induction motor.
- These two algorithms have been implemented on a low cost FPGA device (XC2S100), Table III reports the very short execution time for each FPGAbased control algorithm.
- The proposed design aims to improve the efficiency of diesel engine driven generators by allowing optimum speed operation.
- In the actual Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) module [45], the Vdc voltage and the rate of change of Vdc are used as input variables.
- The control system maintains the output voltage at the desired magnitude and frequency against changes in Vdc which arise from changes in speed and/or load.
IX. CONCLUSIONS AND PERSPECTIVES
- The aim of this paper is to present the contributions f FPGAs to the control of industrial systems.
- To this purpose, a modeling technique is proposed for the holistic investigation of power electronic systems.
- The main characteristics of the proposed architecture design methodology are: the algorithm refinement, the modularity, and the systematic search for the best compromise between the control performances and the architectural constrai ts (see A3 section).
- Finally, full and timely examples are presented to illustrate the benefits of FPGA implementation when using the proposed design approach.
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Citations
476 citations
Cites methods from "FPGA Design Methodology for Industr..."
...However, the limits between these two concepts are vanishing since the RISC unit of microcontrollers is more and more powerful and the number and the types of peripherals in DSPs are increasing....
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...It consists of a 4-bit LUT, a D-Flip-Flop, a carry chain (for arithmetic operations) and a multiplexer, [39]-[42]....
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...This feature gives designer an additional degree of freedom compared to software implementations based on microcontrollers and DSPs [42], [43]....
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...Like microcontrollers and DSPs, FPGAs were born in the eighties and are now a mature technology....
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...This development is made according to the design methodology, [42]-[44], overviewed in Fig....
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...Another possibility is the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) [14]....
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