System-on-Chip FPGA Devices for Complex Electrical Energy Systems Control
Éric Monmasson, Mickaël Hilairet, G. Spagnuolo, Marcian Cirstea
Abstract
Digital electronics has become a standard for controlling electrical systems. This is due to the constant improvement of the digital devices, whether in terms of density, performance, flexibility of use, or cost reduction <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> . This article looks into system-on-chip (SoC) field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for controlling complex electrical energy systems. These devices encompass multicore floating-point microprocessors embedded with standard peripherals and an FPGA fabric that allows the design of custom peripherals and specific hardware (HW) accelerators. Thus, SoC FPGA devices can be regarded as a good compromise between “super” microcontrollers (very fast in terms of computation but with a fixed microarchitecture) and pure FPGAs (ideal for specific concurrent microarchitectures but limited in terms of density).