FPGA-based Controllers

This article presents the benefits of using field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based controllers for power electronics and drive applications. For this purpose, an algorithm perspective is first proposed, where it is stated that, depending on the intrinsic parallelism properties as well as level of complexity, it makes sense to implement each control algorithm on a specific hardware and/or software architecture to get the best performances in terms of execution time or the best ratio performance versus cost. Then, an application perspective is proposed where the constraints specifically linked to the control of power converters are discussed.