A new FPGA based green controller using FBD and HLS

For the renewable energy system, the power conservation and the low heat emission of the control system are big issue. Since those energy plants are installed in the natural environment which is inconvenient for the maintenance, it is very important that the control systems are supplied and maintained for long term without any development risk. The performance of the current CPU depends on the number of cores. The internal architecture is changed every time by the generation alternation. Both the development risk and the maintenance risk of the control systems become higher, and the product life cycle becomes shorter than before. The industrial systems for the infrastructures as well as for the renewable energy equipment are expected to maintain both the software and the hardware which have certain field records. The FPGA is watched, because of its low power consumption, and because of the inheritability of the HDL code. This paper presents a new FPGA based green controller by the approach of using the Function Block Diagram which is suitable for the renewable energy plant. The approach applies the High Level Synthesis to each function block. Its basic behavior is confirmed by a simple tank level control simulation. It is clarified that the reuse of the FPGA resource is an important issue. Also the architecture which reuse the FPGA resources is presented against the issue. The performance is estimated.