An FPGA-Based Multiple-Axis Velocity Controller and Stepping Motors Drives Design

Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, No. 57, Sec. 2, Zhongshan Rd, Taiping Dist., Taichung 41170, Taiwan

^* Corresponding author: chiukl@ncut.edu.tw

Abstract

A Field Programmable Gate Array based system is a great hardware platform to support the implementation of hardware controllers such as PID controller and fuzzy controller. It is also programmed as hardware accelerator to speed up the mathematic calculation and greatly enhance the performance as applied to motor drive and motion control. Furthermore, the open structure of FPGA-based system is suitable for those designs with the ability of parallel processing or soft code processor embedded. In this paper, we apply the FPGA to a multi-axis velocity controller design. The developed system integrated three functions inside the FPGA chip, which are respectively the stepping motor drive, the multi-axis motion controller and the motion planning. Furthermore, an embedded controller with a soft code processor compatible to 8051 micro-control unit (MCU) is built to handle the data transfer between the FPGA board and host PC. The MCU is also used to initialize the motion control and run the interpolator. The designed system is practically applied to a XYZ motion platform which is driven by stepping motors to verify its performance.