New Mechatronics Development Techniques for FPGA-Based Control and Simulation of Electromechanical Systems

Abstract

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been widely adopted in high volume commercial applications, but not as much in the industrial control and simulation arenas. Due to the attractive features of FPGAs, such as their inherent flexibility, performance, parallelism, and low-level reconfigurability, industrial control design and simulation vendors have been creating the next generation FPGA development tool chains that are designed for engineers with little or no digital design expertise. The goal of these next generation system-level design tools is to empower control design, simulation, and signal processing engineers to harness the full power of the FPGA technology, while providing relatively competitive performance and resource usage, as compared to traditional text-based hardware description level (HDL) methods. This paper discusses some of the traditional challenges that prohibited wide adoption of FPGAs in the industrial control and simulation fields, and how new graphical system design tools are helping mechatronics engineers leverage the full power of FPGAs as deployment platforms. Moreover, it discusses some particularly useful development techniques for FPGA-based control and simulation in mechatronics applications.