Dynamically reconfigurable hardware for digital controllers in mechatronic systems

Reconfigurable hardware, and particularly field programmable gates arrays (FPGAs) allow the acceleration of digital control algorithm for mechatronic systems by exploiting their intrinsic parallelism. FPGAs also allow an efficient use of resources and flexible designs by using partial and dynamic reconfiguration. However, fully utilization of those benefits is often prevented by the necessary expertise to use such technology. In this paper a design flow for digital control algorithms using FPGAs is presented, which allows engineers without specialized knowledge on reconfigurable hardware design to use FPGAs as an implementation platform. We introduce a system architecture that enables the use of partially dynamic reconfiguration of FPGAs as part of our design flow and show an implementation example using an inverted pendulum system.