Modeling and Design of Digital Electronic Systems

The paper is concerned with the modern methodologies for holistic modeling of electronic systems enabling system-on-chip design. The method deals with the functional modeling of complete electronic systems using the behavioral features of Hardware Description Languages or high level languages then targeting programmable devices - mainly Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) - for the rapid prototyping of digital electronic controllers. This approach offers major advantages such as: a unique modeling and evaluation environment for complete power systems, the same environment is used for the rapid prototyping of the digital controller, fast design development, short time to market, a CAD platform independent model, reusability of the model/design, generation of valuable IP, high level hardware/software partitioning of the design is enabled, Concurrent Engineering basic rules (unique EDA environment and common design database) are fulfilled. The recent evolution of such design methodologies is marked through references to case studies of electronic system modeling,simulation, controller design and implementation. Pointers for future trends / evolution of electronic design strategies and tools are given

FPGA implementation of embedded fuzzy controllers for robotic applications

Fuzzy-logic-based inference techniques provide efficient solutions for control problems in classical and emerging applications. However, the lack of specific design tools and systematic approaches for hardware implementation of complex fuzzy controllers limits the applicability of these techniques in modern microelectronics products. This paper discusses a design strategy that eases the implementation of embedded fuzzy controllers as systems on programmable chips. The development of the controllers is carried out by means of a reconfigurable platform based on field-programmable gate arrays. This platform combines specific hardware to implement fuzzy inference modules with a general-purpose processor, thus allowing the realization of hybrid hardware/soffivare solutions. As happens to the components of the processing system, the specific fuzzy elements are conceived as configurable intellectual property modules in order to accelerate the controller design cycle. The design methodology and tool chain presented in this paper have been applied to the realization of a control system for solving the navigation tasks of an autonomous vehicle

FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications

The aim of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies and their contribution to industrial control applications. Authors start by addressing various research fields which can exploit the advantages of FPGAs. The features of these devices are then presented, followed by their corresponding design tools. To illustrate the benefits of using FPGAs in the case of complex control applications, a sensorless motor controller has been treated. This controller is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. Its development has been made according to a dedicated design methodology, which is also discussed. The use of FPGAs to implement artificial intelligence-based industrial controllers is then briefly reviewed. The final section presents two short case studies of Neural Network control systems designs targeting FPGAs

FPGA Implementation of Embedded Fuzzy Controllers for Robotic Applications

Fuzzy-logic-based inference techniques provide efficient solutions for control problems in classical and emerging applications. However, the lack of specific design tools and systematic approaches for hardware implementation of complex fuzzy controllers limits the applicability of these techniques in modern microelectronics products. This paper discusses a design strategy that eases the implementation of embedded fuzzy controllers as systems on programmable chips. The development of the controllers is carried out by means of a reconfigurable platform based on field-programmable gate arrays. This platform combines specific hardware to implement fuzzy inference modules with a general-purpose processor, thus allowing the realization of hybrid hardware/software solutions. As happens to the components of the processing system, the specific fuzzy elements are conceived as configurable intellectual property modules in order to accelerate the controller design cycle. The design methodology and tool chain presented in this paper have been applied to the realization of a control system for solving the navigation tasks of an autonomous vehicle. © 2007 IEEE.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2005-04359/MIC y DPI2005-02293Junta de Andalucía TIC2006-635 y TEP2006-37

Fuzzy logic controllers on chip

This paper analyzes a fuzzy logic (FL) oriented instruction set (micro)controller and their implementations on FIPSOC1. VHDL code is synthesized using a small portion of FIPSOC FPGA2. This circuits are used from the mP8051 FIPSOC built-in microcontroller to provide efficient arithmetic operations such as multipliers, dividers, minimums and maximums.Eje: Sistemas de Tiempo RealRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

FPGA design methodology for industrial control systems—a review

This paper reviews the state of the art of fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) design methodologies with a focus on industrial control system applications. This paper starts with an overview of FPGA technology development, followed by a presentation of design methodologies, development tools and relevant CAD environments, including the use of portable hardware description languages and system level programming/design tools. They enable a holistic functional approach with the major advantage of setting up a unique modeling and evaluation environment for complete industrial electronics systems. Three main design rules are then presented. These are algorithm refinement, modularity, and systematic search for the best compromise between the control performance and the architectural constraints. An overview of contributions and limits of FPGAs is also given, followed by a short survey of FPGA-based intelligent controllers for modern industrial systems. Finally, two complete and timely case studies are presented to illustrate the benefits of an FPGA implementation when using the proposed system modeling and design methodology. These consist of the direct torque control for induction motor drives and the control of a diesel-driven synchronous stand-alone generator with the help of fuzzy logic

A Survey on FPGA-Based Sensor Systems: Towards Intelligent and Reconfigurable Low-Power Sensors for Computer Vision, Control and Signal Processing

The current trend in the evolution of sensor systems seeks ways to provide more accuracy and resolution, while at the same time decreasing the size and power consumption. The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provides specific reprogrammable hardware technology that can be properly exploited to obtain a reconfigurable sensor system. This adaptation capability enables the implementation of complex applications using the partial reconfigurability at a very low-power consumption. For highly demanding tasks FPGAs have been favored due to the high efficiency provided by their architectural flexibility (parallelism, on-chip memory, etc.), reconfigurability and superb performance in the development of algorithms. FPGAs have improved the performance of sensor systems and have triggered a clear increase in their use in new fields of application. A new generation of smarter, reconfigurable and lower power consumption sensors is being developed in Spain based on FPGAs. In this paper, a review of these developments is presented, describing as well the FPGA technologies employed by the different research groups and providing an overview of future research within this field.The research leading to these results has received funding from the Spanish Government and European FEDER funds (DPI2012-32390), the Valencia Regional Government (PROMETEO/2013/085) and the University of Alicante (GRE12-17)

Field programmable gate array hardware in the loop validation of fuzzy direct torque control for induction machine drive

Introduction. Currently, the direct torque control is very popular in industry and is of great interest to scientists in the variable speed drive of asynchronous machines. This technique provides decoupling between torque control and flux without the need to use pulse width modulation or coordinate transformation. Nevertheless, this command presents two major importunities: the switching frequency is highly variable on the one hand, and on the other hand, the amplitude of the torque and stator flux ripples remain poorly controlled throughout the considered operating speed range. The novelty of this article proposes improvements in performance of direct torque control of asynchronous machines by development of a fuzzy direct torque control algorithm. This latter makes it possible to provide solutions to the major problems of this control technique, namely: torque ripples, flux ripples, and failure to control switching frequency. Purpose. The emergence of this method has given rise to various works whose objective is to show its performance, or to provide solutions to its limitations. Indeed, this work consists in validation of a fuzzy direct torque control architecture implemented on the ML402 development kit (based on the Xilinx Virtex-4 type field programmable gate array circuit), through hardware description language (VHDL) and Xilinx generator system. The obtained results showed the robustness of the control and sensorless in front of load and parameters variation of induction motor control. The research directions of the model were determined for the subsequent implementation of results with simulation samples.Вступ. В даний час пряме управління моментом дуже популярне в промисловості і викликає великий інтерес у вчених у галузі частотно-регульованого приводу асинхронних машин. Цей метод забезпечує розв'язку між керуванням моментом, що крутить, і магнітним потоком без необхідності використання широтно-імпульсної модуляції або перетворення координат. Тим не менш, ця команда представляє дві основні незручності: з одного боку, частота комутації сильно варіюється, а з іншого боку, амплітуда пульсацій моменту і потоку статора залишається погано контрольованою у всьому діапазоні робочих швидкостей. Новизна цієї статті пропонує поліпшення характеристик прямого керування моментом, що крутить, асинхронних машин шляхом розробки нечіткого алгоритму прямого управління моментом, що крутить. Останнє дозволяє вирішити основні проблеми цього методу управління, а саме: пульсації моменту, що крутить, пульсації потоку і нездатність контролювати частоту перемикання. Мета. Поява цього методу породило різні роботи, метою яких є показати його ефективність чи запропонувати рішення стосовно його обмежень. Дійсно, ця робота полягає у перевірці нечіткої архітектури прямого управління моментом, що крутить, реалізованої в наборі для розробки ML402 (на основі схеми Xilinx Virtex-4 з програмованою користувачем вентильною матрицею), за допомогою мови опису обладнання (VHDL) та генераторної системи Xilinx. Отримані результати показали робастність керування та безсенсорного керування при зміні навантаження та параметрів керування асинхронним двигуном. Визначено напрями дослідження моделі для подальшої реалізації результатів на імітаційних вибірках

Development of FPGA based Standalone Tunable Fuzzy Logic Controllers

Soft computing techniques differ from conventional (hard) computing, in that unlike hard computing, it is tolerant of imprecision, uncertainty, partial truth, and approximation. In effect, the role model for soft computing is the human mind and its ability to address day-to-day problems. The principal constituents of Soft Computing (SC) are Fuzzy Logic (FL), Evolutionary Computation (EC), Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). This thesis presents a generic hardware architecture for type-I and type-II standalone tunable Fuzzy Logic Controllers (FLCs) in Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The designed FLC system can be remotely configured or tuned according to expert operated knowledge and deployed in different applications to replace traditional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controllers. This re-configurability is added as a feature to existing FLCs in literature. The FLC parameters which are needed for tuning purpose are mainly input range, output range, number of inputs, number of outputs, the parameters of the membership functions like slope and center points, and an If-Else rule base for the fuzzy inference process. Online tuning enables users to change these FLC parameters in real-time and eliminate repeated hardware programming whenever there is a need to change. Realization of these systems in real-time is difficult as the computational complexity increases exponentially with an increase in the number of inputs. Hence, the challenge lies in reducing the rule base significantly such that the inference time and the throughput time is perceivable for real-time applications. To achieve these objectives, Modified Rule Active 2 Overlap Membership Function (MRA2-OMF), Modified Rule Active 3 Overlap Membership Function (MRA3-OMF), Modified Rule Active 4 Overlap Membership Function (MRA4-OMF), and Genetic Algorithm (GA) base rule optimization methods are proposed and implemented. These methods reduce the effective rules without compromising system accuracy and improve the cycle time in terms of Fuzzy Logic Inferences Per Second (FLIPS). In the proposed system architecture, the FLC is segmented into three independent modules, fuzzifier, inference engine with rule base, and defuzzifier. Fuzzy systems employ fuzzifier to convert the real world crisp input into the fuzzy output. In type 2 fuzzy systems there are two fuzzifications happen simultaneously from upper and lower membership functions (UMF and LMF) with subtractions and divisions. Non-restoring, very high radix, and newton raphson approximation are most widely used division algorithms in hardware implementations. However, these prevalent methods have a cost of more latency. In order to overcome this problem, a successive approximation division algorithm based type 2 fuzzifier is introduced. It has been observed that successive approximation based fuzzifier computation is faster than the other type 2 fuzzifier. A hardware-software co-design is established on Virtex 5 LX110T FPGA board. The MATLAB Graphical User Interface (GUI) acquires the fuzzy (type 1 or type 2) parameters from users and a Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter (UART) is dedicated to data communication between the hardware and the fuzzy toolbox. This GUI is provided to initiate control, input, rule transfer, and then to observe the crisp output on the computer. A proposed method which can support canonical fuzzy IF-THEN rules, which includes special cases of the fuzzy rule base is included in Digital Fuzzy Logic Controller (DFLC) architecture. For this purpose, a mealy state machine is incorporated into the design. The proposed FLCs are implemented on Xilinx Virtex-5 LX110T. DFLC peripheral integration with Micro-Blaze (MB) processor through Processor Logic Bus (PLB) is established for Intellectual Property (IP) core validation. The performance of the proposed systems are compared to Fuzzy Toolbox of MATLAB. Analysis of these designs is carried out by using Hardware-In-Loop (HIL) test to control various plant models in MATLAB/Simulink environments