While this may not be the exact case of typical power electronics system designers (who mostly design by integrating off-the-shelf MCU and DSP chips), this article written by Geoffrey James is giving a good picture of the current state of FPGA technology and design tools for SoC design :
Trend #1: Today’s FPGAs are gaining features […]
Here’s a very extensive article written in two parts (part 1 here, part 2 here) by John Smitty of Actel Corporation.
According to Smitty, “the potential energy savings are staggering. Over 40 million electric motors are used in manufacturing operations in the United States alone. Electric motors account for 65 to 70 percent of industrial electrical energy consumption […]
FPGA technology in power electronics application is not only a matter of glue logic or system-on-a-chip platform but is also a matter of high-performance computing for real-time simulators of electric motor drives and any dynamic systems.
The use of FPGA in high-performance computing is not new: many applications have benefitted of the accelerated computing capabilities of those […]
Here’s an interesting online tutorial presented by the famous Clive ‘Max’ Maxfield introducing Actel Fusion mixed-signal FPGA and how they can useful for Motor Control applications. A general introduction on FPGAs is presented for people that aren’t familiar with this type of technology (which typically the case for motor control system designers).
Hurry up : this tutorial […]
The movement has been going on for a few years and it accelerates. From specialized digital signal processing chips mainly used in communication applications, FPGA manufacturers have entered in the embedded system market to compete DSP and MCU chips.
Regarding raw computing performances (and not considering cost and design methodology), it is generally accepted that FPGAs, with their inherent […]