Thus, FPGA devices are very attractive for realizing modern, complex digital controller designs,” he says. In effect, there is no bottleneck due to interrupts or event sequencers, as in DSP or microprocessor designs. Alternately, the same FPGA can be reconfigured to perform processing on the digital signals and measure pulse width, perform digital filtering, or even measure position and velocity from a quadrature encoder sensor,” says Fritz.Īccording to James Bonanno, P.E., of Atlantix Engineering, a company specializing in FPGA design consulting, “An engineer can tailor an FPGA design to fit a control algorithm, rather than fit the control algorithm to a processor’s capabilities. “For example, a digital input module can be used to simply read the true/false state of each digital line. FPGAs are often used to reconfigure I/O module functionality. In manufacturing and automation contexts, FPGAs are well-suited for use in robotics and machine tool applications, as well as for fan, pump, compressor and conveyor control. “Unlike hard-wired printed circuit board designs that have fixed hardware resources, FPGA-based systems can literally rewire their internal circuitry to allow configuration after the control system is deployed to the field,” says Christian Fritz, product manager for motion control and mechatronics for National Instruments. That means speeds can be very fast, and multiple control loops can run on a single FPGA device at different rates.Īlso, the reconfigurability of FPGAs can provide designers with almost limitless flexibility. Because the processing paths are parallel, different operations do not have to compete for the same processing resources. Unlike processors, FPGAs use dedicated hardware for processing logic and do not have an operating system. Increasingly sophisticated tools are enabling embedded control system designers to more quickly create and more easily adapt FPGA-based applications.

Blog, video series teaches FPGA techniquesĪ field programmable gate array (FPGA) contains a matrix of reconfigurable gate array logic circuitry that, when configured, is connected in a way that creates a hardware implementation of a software application.

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