March 2009 - FPGAs Turbocharge Control Design

 
Extract from a Control Design article written by Stuart McFarlane, featuring comments by Dr Martin Saxon, Director of Product Technology Partners Ltd .

A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a programmable logic device capable of supporting thousands of gates. Some engineers already use FPGAs to design controls. Others have heard of FPGAs but haven’t considered using them. Every so often, it’s good to look up from what you’re doing and see what’s going on. So, first question: Why use FPGAs in the first place?

FPGAs are fast. Today’s class of FPGAs can perform an incredible amount of processing and are capable of truly parallel processing, breaking the single processor serialization of execution. Algorithms running 10 MHz and higher are not unusual. Reaction times are measured in nanoseconds—plenty fast for today’s applications.

FPGAs are flexible. They can span the analog and digital world. The devices are especially good in the purely digital world, but if you add analog to digital and digital to analog converters, then you have a deterministic, high-performance mixed computing platform. The combination of functions incorporated into the fabric of the FPGA is up the control designer. Changes to the application can be downloaded to the FPGA without redesigning the circuit board.

My interest in FPGAs is not in the field-programmable feature, although that is very important. What I find more engaging is the flexibility and performance. For as long as control problems have been existed, the desire for higher performance has been constant. “If only the controller was faster, easier to program or more capable” is a common refrain. Every design is a trade-off of performance, manufacturing cost and development cost. What if the boundaries between those trade-offs were significantly redrawn?

Absorbing Functions

“We needed to employ a technology that could give us the performance we required in a maintainable package and a sensible price,” explains Dr Martin Saxon, Director, Product Technology Partners, Cambridge, U.K. PTP develops custom control, test and measurement systems for research, development and production. “We required multi-channel data acquisition at 100k samples/sec synchronized with closed-loop hydraulic servo control on two axes, including safety checks, using up to 20 kHz loop rate. We required the capability to apply advanced control algorithms—non-linear multivariable adaptive and self-tuning control—as well as simple gain-scheduled PID control.” PTP’s aim is to use off-the-shelf hardware product wherever possible.

“When the design was carried out, we were not aware of any other single product that could provide the same capability as the FPGA product we used,” says Dr Saxon. “We could have achieved the same goals using a combination of other products, but at extra cost and increased system complexity. We used National Instruments’ FPGA product so these claims are not necessarily applicable to starting from scratch with a bare FPGA and nothing else.”

For any given application, the electrical signal conditioning to connect the FPGA to the outside world still is required. However, you often can simplify the form of this conditioning. Components can be eliminated and their functions absorbed into the FPGA code. The designer can implement counters, pulse-width modulation (PWM) generators, signal generators, filters and math directly in the FPGA. For example, you can implement a complete closed-loop hydraulic actuator control with LDVT feedback with only two active external conditioning components—a voltage buffer for driving the LVDT excitation coil and a voltage-to-current driver for the hydraulic servo valve. The FPGA would provide the excitation waveform for the LVDT, demodulate the LDVT feedback to produce position, use position to compute velocity, implement the closed-loop model and output the command value to the servo valve. Add an analog pressure input and you can create a force controller with velocity-limiting or shutdown protection.

Continues.....

The full text of this article can be found here.