Design and implementation of hard-wired tracking control system

Many of recent control systems are required to finish complex calculations in a very short period. Hard-wired implementation of control logic is a prospective solution to these computationally demanding applications. This study presents an implementation of tracking control system, which was first designed with Simulink, converted into VHDL with HDL Coder, and then implemented with an Altera Stratix III FPGA device. The derived performance of the hard-wired predictive control circuit was 15 M steps/s, which is approximately 20 times faster than the corresponding software implementation on Intel Atom Z530 (1.6 GHz). The hard-wired implementation fulfills the requirement for real-time prediction (1.1 M steps/s), which could not be satisfied by the software implementation.