Using advanced FPGA SoC technologies for the design of industrial control applications

Modern industrial control systems must offer performance, flexibility and reliability. On the same time, they need to reach the market as early as possible and at low cost. Finally, they need to operate as embedded devices with low power budget. On top of that, the algorithms that they implement are getting even more sophisticated, advanced and demanding. To cope with all these diverse requirements, control system designers are moving with fast steps to the digital hardware design field and specifically, FPGAs, System-on-Chip architectures and productivity improving methodologies like High-Level Synthesis, which uses C/C++ as an abstract hardware description language. In this paper, using these tools, the implementation of 3 control algorithms is shown, the classical PID algorithm, a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) and an Adaptive or Tuning Fuzzy Logic Controller (TFLC). The novelty of the proposed approach is that through specific coding and compiler directives, the C/C++ input descriptions are automatically implemented as advanced multicore architectures (3 most advanced of them are put to extensive experimentation and compared), which execute up to 500K algorithm iterations in less that 1 sec, taking advantage of an embedded ARM family microcontroller and common memory blocks found in the underlying FPGA implementation device. This is a substantial performance improvements and a high productivity boost, with very promising future extension capabilities.