Design of a scalable FPGA based inverter for complex drive systems

This paper presents the design and implementation of motor control peripherals on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) in conjuction with a microcontroller, forming a powerful and flexible computing platform for inverter drives. The implementation of a vector controlled pulse width modulation, an encoder interface and a current measurement unit are described. Furthermore a current control unit is implemented on the FPGA in order to relieve the microcontroller from some high frequency real-time tasks. The FPGA and the microcontroller form a flexible control board which is used for different projects including high speed multi level inverters and four quadrant drive systems. Furthermore multi axes systems can be implement without any performance drawbacks and just a moderately increased effort optimizing the use of an FPGA.