Three-phase induction motor drive by FPGA

Induction motors are mainly employed in industrial processes as actuators and final elements. Hardware implementation of induction motor control and drive systems is an important issue of industrial motor applications. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology provides programmable system-on-chip (PSoC) environments for designing modern digital ASIC controllers for specific applications. This paper presents a FPGA based speed control IC for three-phase induction motor drives. The sinusoidal PWM is realized on a single FPGA chip from Xilinx Inc. to provide controlling switching pulses for inverter block. In the experiment, the speed control is done by adjusting modulation index and frequency from the FPGA side. The performance of the proposed FPGA based drive is compared with soft drive approach in electrical machine laboratory where variable voltage and frequency power supplies are used for motor speed control. Simulation and experimental results, given to verify the implemented SPWM control IC, demonstrate that FPGA-based solution for induction motor drive is flexible, low cost and high-performance.