Design methodology and FPGA-based controllers for Power Electronics and drive applications

This paper presents a short state-of-the-art Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. An efficient design methodology for designing FPGA-based controllers is also described. To illustrate the interest of this methodology, a complex sensorless algorithm for AC drives has been chosen. It consists in an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), which is most of the time implemented in a DSP controller. In the last part of the paper, authors try to demonstrate all the benefits of using FPGAs for power electronic and drive applications. Two cases are discussed, the high demanding applications and the constrained switching frequency applications.