A method and industrial case: Replacement of an FPGA component in a legacy control system

A significant part of industrial systems have requirements on long life times. Such requirements on the complete system impose requirements on its corresponding embedded systems to be operational for an equally long time. As a consequence it is of paramount importance to be able to replace obsolete components of the embedded systems during the life time of the system, and to be able to update part of the design due to new requirements. In this paper we present a method to manage component replacement in such systems, and we present an industrial case study highlighting the work needed to replace an FPGA chip with another, including all corresponding legacy FPGA design challenges that comes with such a replacement. We have found one larger problem inherent in the ability to use the included components in a way that is not possible with the new circuits replacing the old ones. This problem significantly increased the work needed when performing the conversion and migration from the old design to the new, since parts of the design had to be redesigned from a functional perspective.