Hardware implementation of fuzzy logic MPPT controller on a FPGA platform

In recent years, many approaches and techniques have been explored for tracking the maximum power point (MPP) of a photovoltaic system. The Fuzzy logic is one of the recommended tools used in this area due to the simplicity of its formulation coupled with its expressive power. This paper describes the hardware implementation of Fuzzy Logic MPPT Controller on a Altera reconfigurable Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) using VHDL Hardware Description Language. The system is built up with major modules namely fuzzification, inference and defuzzification. Also, the FLC HW/SW Co-design approach using the Nios II embedded soft-core is discussed in this work. The hardware part of the system is implemented using SOPC builder tool in conjunction with Quartus II software, whereas the software part is developed by C/C++ language using the Nios II IDE software provided by Altera. The simulation results obtained with ModelSim and Matlab/Simulink shows a satisfactory performance with a good agreement between the results of the FLC HW/SW implementation on FPGA, Altera DE2-70 board. This result prove that the designed system, extract successfully, the MPP for photovoltaic system.