Control in Power Electronics : Selected Problems 7 New Technology Contributions of FPGAs to the Control of Electrical Systems , a Review

These last twenty years were outstanding by the revolution of technology possibilities in the field of digital electronic and this, as much as within context of programmable solutions (microcontroller, DSP, DSP-controller...), than of hardware solutions (CPLD, FPGA, ASIC...). Among all these possibilities, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a good compromise between the advantage of the flexibility of a programming solution and the efficiency of a specific architecture with a high integration density. These characteristics are quite appropriate for controller design. In this paper, the authors present a review of the contributions of FPGAs to the control of electrical systems. FPGA salient features and their CAD development environment will first be presented. Afterward, an appropriate design methodology based on modularity and optimization will be proposed. Finally, after a discussion of the contributions and the limits of FPGA technology, a representative example of architecture for control of electrical systems will be exposed. It consists in a Direct Torque Controller (DTC) for an induction motor drive. Index Terms FPGA, control of electrical systems, design methodology, programmable architecture