FPGA Based Elevator Controller with Improved Reliability

This paper introduces a novel method to improve the reliability of a reconfigurable FPGA based elevator controller, which can be used for an elevator with any number of floors, with specified inputs and outputs. It was clear that by simply changing a variable in the HDL code the controller can be generated for an elevator with required number of floors. Thus in this paper the primary implementation and verification procedure is given in detail together with a method to improve the reliability. The flexibility in expansion of designs in an FPGA was considered thoroughly in the proposed reliability improving method. The controller was developed using Verilog HDL throughout the research and a description on the code development is included in the paper. The controller generated was successfully implemented on a Xilinx Spartan 3AN FPGA and tested for a prototype elevator with three floors.