Design and implementation of an FPGA-based control IC for AC-voltage regulation

This paper presents a field-programmable gate army (FPGA)-based control integrated circuit (IC) for controlling the pulsewidth modulation (PWM) inverters used in power conditioning systems for AC-voltage regulation. We also propose a multiple-loop control scheme for this PWM inverter control IC to achieve sinusoidal voltage regulation under large load variations. The control scheme is simple in architecture and thus facilitates realization of the proposed digital controller for the PWM inverter using the FPGA-based circuit design approach. Bit-length effect of the digital PWM inverter controller has also been examined in this paper. The designed PWM inverter control IC has been realized using a single FPGA XC4005 from Xilinx Inc., which can be used as a coprocessor with a general-purpose microprocessor in application of AC-voltage regulation. Owing to the high-speed nature of FPGA, the sampling frequency of the constructed IC can be raised up to the range that cannot be reached using a conventional digital controller based merely on microcontrollers or a digital signal processor (DSP). Experimental results show the designed PWM inverter control IC using the proposed control scheme can achieve good voltage regulation against large load variations.