FPGA-design for Power Electronics

Nowadays, more and more features are required for controlling power electronic systems.

This leads to more complex controllers and then a careful choice of the digital platform to be adopted is needed.

Different digital devices are available: microcontrollers, DSPs and Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The last ones are more and more used thanks to their flexibility and the possibility to take advantage of the parallel treatment. These platforms consist of a matrix of elementary cells that can be interconnected and programmed to build specific hardware architectures.

However, with the new FPGAs, the designer should not only build the architecture but should also program the processors on the board, control peripherals and establish the communication between the two parts.

In this seminar the main elements of the FPGA structure are given and the fundamental differences with the software counterpart (microcontroller and DSP) are provided. The major tools are examined (Vivado, HLS, HDL Coder) and different applications are presented. The final goals are to better understand FPGA devices and to give guidelines to choose the proper digital platform in power electronic applications.