System-on-Chip FPGA Devices for Complex Electrical Energy Systems Control

Digital electronics has become a standard for controlling electrical systems. This is due to the constant improvement of the digital devices, whether in terms of density, performance, flexibility of use or cost reduction. This paper looks into System-on-Chip (SoC) Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for controlling complex electrical energy systems. These devices encompass multicore floating point microprocessors embedded with standard peripherals together with an FPGA fabric that allows the design of custom peripherals and specific hardware accelerators. Thus, SoC FPGA devices can be regarded as a good compromise between “super” microcontrollers (very fast in terms of computation but with a fixed micro-architecture) and pure FPGAs (ideal for specific concurrent micro-architectures but limited in terms of density).