Performance improvements in a modern hardware design environment for control applications

Digital design is growing rapidly during the last years, offering advanced implementation solutions for a diversity of appliances and instruments, integrating different sensors and actuators. This has a great impact on embedded computing, where high performance Embedded Controllers, Digital Signal Processor (DSP) chips and, more recently, power efficient Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), connected into heterogeneous multicore architectures, are found in a diverse range of applications. Such new implementation platforms bring together efficient design methodologies, like high-level or C level hardware design. In their turn, new design methodologies are accompanied by new design technologies like Electronic System Level (ESL) design and High-Level Synthesis (HLS). This paper presents a multicore architecture and a corresponding HLS based design methodology applied in the design of demanding digital controllers, as a reference for modern control applications. The advantages of the proposed methodology are: (a) improved performance through hardware acceleration of demanding application cores, (b) improved quality of results with floating point calculations, (c) flexibility and integration of common peripheral devices supported by a RISC microcontroller and (d) improved designer productivity by working with C level design descriptions only. Experimental results show substantial performance improvements and a high productivity boost, with very promising future extension capabilities.