An FPGA-based VME slave module for industrial control system

The VME bus is a widely used industrial bus, which is applied in military, industrial, aerospace, communication and control applications. This paper presents a VME slave module based on FPGA, which is applied in an industrial control system for back-to-back neutral point clamped converter. The design of the slave module is discussed in detail. Comparing with traditional cases without FPGA, this module has the ability to be reprogrammed, which is convenient for different transmission types on the same hardware structure. The experiments demonstrate its two main types of data transfers on the VME bus, single byte cycle, and Block Transfer cycle, focusing on the data transfer characteristics and time analysis. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of FPGA, providing both functions for data storage and transfer, which saves much more space and time.