Potentials and Pitfalls of FPGA Application in Inverter Drives - a Case Study

With the aid of a specific case study, this work presents the options offered by Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in electric drives applications. As it happened in the transition from microprocessors to digital signal processors (DSP), it is worth to analyse what are the limitations and the possible pitfalls of the FPGA-based design, compared with conventional DSP implementation. As a case study, it has been implemented a Space Vector Modulator (SVM) for a three phase voltage inverter. The proposed SVM algorithm includes a novel dead time compensation technique, whose implementation is made possible solely by the use of an FPGA component. An extended analysis of the state of the art and experimental results are included in the paper.