FPGA technology for multi-axis control systems

The research presented in this article applies the newest Field-Programmable-Gate-Arrays to implement motor controller devices in accordance with the actual core-based design. The flexibility of the System-on-a-Programmable-Chips in motor multi-axis control systems enables the processing of the most intensive computation operations by hardware (PID IP cores) and the trajectory computation by software in the same device. In those systems, the trajectory generation software may run in powerful microprocessors embedded in the FPGA. In this paper, we present a high-performance PID IP core controller described in VHDL; the design flow that has been followed in its design and how the simulation and the PID constants tuning has been approached. The reusability of this module is demonstrated with the design of a 4 axis SoPC controller. Additionally, an experimental self-reconfigurable SoPC design using Run-Time-Reconfiguration is presented. In this case, the control IP core can be replaced dynamically by another module with another with different features. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.