A partial reconfigurable FPGA implementation for industrial controllers using SFC-petri net description (abstract only)

Sequential Control System in the industry has been used in applications based on Programmable Logical Controllers (PLC). These Systems are, in general, highly complex and with an operation cycle around 1ms or 10ms. PLC are, in general, expensive for theses high complex applications. In this work, a Dynamical Reconfigurable approach is presented, based on Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA architecture, operating as a virtual hardware machine. In this context, the control process is specified in the industrial standard language SFC/Petri net (Sequential Function Chart). For large controllers, a partial and dynamical reconfiguration mechanism takes place and the controller is split into multiple contexts, which are sequentially executed within the same FPGA, without violating the operation cycle of the system, in spite of the reconfiguration overhead. The solution is cost compatible with current PLC for complex applications and can reach better performance by exploration of the potential parallelism of control descriptions.