From Control Design to FPGA Implementation
Marcus Mller, Hans-Christian Schwannecke, Wolfgang Fengler · InTech eBooks · 2012
As a modelling and simulation tool, MATLAB/Simulink plays a significant role in industrial control design. To allow the deployment of the designed control solutions a number of code generation facilities have been developed, that aim on implementing PC-based control units or embedded controllers based on micro-controllers or digital signal processors (DSP). This has enabled MATLAB/Simulink to cover the model-based development process from conceptual design over simulative validation to rapid-prototyping (Krasner (2004)). Although not a new technology per se, since the first commercial field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has been released by Xilinx in 1985, recent development in the field of reconfigurable hardware has created FPGAs, the capabilities of which apply to the requirements of industrial control in a growing number of application domains (Monmasson & Cirstea (2007)). Therefore, also code generation facilities targeting FPGAs have emerged, that link the modelling level to the level of hardware description languages (HDL), from which the lower-level descriptions (RTL) and chip-specific implementations are derived using hardware synthesis tool chains.