Guest Editorial Special Section on Industrial Control Applications of FPGAs

Since Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has emerged in the mid-80s, it made significant progress in many aspects related to performance and efficiency. The density increase of the FPGA´s internal resources has also allowed integrating several processor cores within a single component, leading to (Multiple Programmable) System-on-Chip designs. In 2011, Monmasson et al. [IEEE Ind. Electron. Mag., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 14-26, Mar. 2011] discussed the potential benefits of an FPGA-based controller compared to a standard software solution, from the final industrial application perspective. The paper demonstrates that a single chip reconfigurable hardware platform can constitute a solution which addresses the main control challenges posed by power electronic and drive applications. Some of these challenges are: i) handling capability for the inherent parallelism of multilevel and interleaved power converter structures; ii) design a quasi-analog controller with no computational delay; iii) ensure a perfect synchronism between several required sampling actions; iv) enhance the sampling rate of a regulation; and v) include additional tasks to the embedded controller (such as prediction, health monitoring and diagnosis). This Special Section on Industrial Control Applications of FPGAs of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS constitutes a fresh opportunity to collate research papers summarizing novel solutions to the aforementioned challenges, resulting from the ongoing intensive research carried out by the industrial electronics community. After a thorough review process 13 papers were finally selected. They are classified by main topic of interest into three groups: i) drive applications; ii) power electronic applications; and iii) design methods. These papers are briefly summarized.