Migrating Microcontroller Based Control Systems into the Nano Fabrics of FPGAS

The advent of cheap and immensely capable Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) facilitates a programmable nano-space that allows the process control designers to move their design to a “soft” reprogrammable hardware environment. Although this virtually-instrumented nano-level system bread boarding is cumbersome due to the complexity of the state of the art hardware descriptor languages, there exist completely tested soft processor cores for rapid prototyping. With these soft processor cores, it is possible to migrate the entire embedded systems functionality into the nano-fabrics of the FPGAs. The present paper communicates rapid prototyping of microcontroller based control systems by integration of the Soft IP core on FPGA. A case study is taken up with Picoblaze, the Soft IP core of Xilinx implemented on Spartan III FPGA. The case study reports implementation of single setpoint temperature controller. The customization achieved is evident from the synthesis view of the implemented processor. Usage of resources and redundant hardware presented in the design summary justifies the selection of an appropriate FPGA for the intended application. The results serve as a guiding source for implementation of full custom Nano-ASIC implementation an added advantage of thorough testing in an accelerated time to market design paradigm.