Use of hardware and software information processing in mechatronics on the example of an adaptive control

Today micro-controllers and signal processors are the standard-implementing platform for embedded controllers. But often their performance cannot keep pace with requirements for demanding applications, for example in mechatronic systems. Usually, in this case the microcontroller is replaced by a faster one. But this doesn´t avoid software problems arising in realtime applications even by using high-level languages and always by using assembler language. Further problems are concerned with higher clock frequencies and energy consumption. On the other hand FPGAs are very well suited for high-speed applications, because information processing can be performed in parallel. But they usually lack common mathematical function libraries, so that control and filter algorithms have to be implemented in a time consuming and expensive process. Today´s FPGAs offer a huge number of gates, so that even a processor core can be implemented inside. This enables a combination of hardware and software signal processing within only one IC. Thereby the available software can be used further on and only some algorithms requiring high performance have to be implemented in hardware. Furthermore some aspects of reconfigurable computing are treated.