Design and Development of FPGA and FPAA Based Remote Terminal Units for Nuclear Power Plants

Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) are single board remote data acquisition & control systems that are widely used in Nuclear Reactors for acquiring & controlling various analog & digital plant parameters during all states of plant operation. These systems send digitized data packets over Ethernet to the nearest local control centre. Existing design is based on standard off the shelf discrete components which include Microcontroller, Digital ICs like transceivers, logic gates & decoder, analog ICs like Multiplexer, Op-amp, instrumentation amplifier & filters and Mixed Signal IC like ADC. The design implementation concepts of FPGA & FPAA based RTUs is discussed in this paper where the programmable digital & reconfigurable analog hardware is used for replacing multiple discrete digital/analog components in the design. This has enabled us to design RTUs more compact and immune towards component obsolescence issues, with added advantage of more reliability & reduced power consumption.