#SPS11 Test drive industry’s first virtual target for software development on SoC FPGAs

Altera Corporation demonstrated its latest industrial embedded solutions for energy-efficient and safety-integrated drive systems.

They highlighted how its Cyclone® series of FPGAs enables integrated, high-performance industrial systems such as drive systems with a high-performance control loop in floating point. Visitors to the booth also can test drive the industry’s first Virtual Target for software development on the new Cyclone V SoC FPGA with the integrated ARM® Cortex(TM)-A9 MPCore(TM) processor. Many designers use Cyclone FPGAs in a wide range of industrial applications including drives, PLCs, inverters and embedded control.

Demonstrations included:

• “Drive-on-a-chip” solution through model-based design
• Leveraging the FPGA industry’s first variable-precision DSP architecture, Altera tools such as DSP Builder and Qsys take advantage of floating-point algorithms implemented in MathWorks Simulink to reduce control loop latency and extend intellectual property (IP) reuse
• Building a drive on a single device by integrating the motor control algorithm, logic, encoder interface and Industrial Ethernet protocols
  o Using EBV Elektronik’s FalconEye FPGA system with a brushless motor to deliver a flexible hardware reference platform that significantly reduces development time
• Support for multiple industrial networking protocols on a single device
• The Industrial Networking Kit (INK), featuring the Cyclone IV E FPGA, expands support for the leading Industrial Ethernet protocols on a single FPGA
• Integrated FPGA control for 3-level IGBTs
• A hardware reference system highlighting an efficient method for 3-level space-vector modulation for inverters and high-frequency drives
• The latest in 3-level insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) with smaller output voltage steps that reduce potential issues with long power cables between the inverter and motor
• New software development tool for ARM-Based SoC FPGAs
• FPGA industry’s first Virtual Target for software development on SoC FPGAs designed to enable immediate device-specific embedded software development
• PC-based functional simulation of embedded development board for Cyclone V and Arria® V SoC FPGA devices
• Binary- and register-compatible, functional equivalent of SoC FPGA board ensures that software developed on the Virtual Target can be moved to the actual board with minimal effort