Modular Design Approach for Model-Based Drive Control Systems on Reconfigurable Logic

Architectures based on reconfigurable hardware, notably FPGAs, are an emerging trend in signal processing applications. For industrial control systems, the benefits of this technology, real parallelization combined with flexibility, offer a great potential. Regarding drive controls, reconfigurable hardware can be used to implement sophisticated control loops for which state of the art processor-based platforms are not performant enough. This capability was verified using FPGA-based prototyping systems, providing easy to use development processes.However, to date, no standard industrial drive control utilizes and benefits from this technology. A key factor for this is that besides the design of the control loop itself, its integration into a drive control system is crucial for industrial use, including functional, process, communication and safety aspects. While available tools are focused on the control loop implementation, the latter requirements are not currently fulfilled.In the context of the presented research, a new module-based approach was developed, providing a holistic solution for all the requirements. Thereby, the design of a control loop is based on basic blocks which not only provide the mathematical functionality, but also features to fit into a drive control system. Furthermore, a drive control architecture providing a flexible design space is presented, in which the modular approach can be used.