DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF FPGA BASED MULTIPURPOSE REAL-TIME CONTROLLER FOR HYBRID STEPPER MOTOR
Stepper motors are one of the most widely used special electrical machine where controlled movement is mandatory. Hybrid stepper motors (HSM) exhibit high static and dynamic torque and run at very small step angles. They are also used in extensive industrial applications. Due to the development of digital control systems, HSM became more attractive to be used in robotics applications, nuclear reactors and computer numerical control machines where they have to perform high-precision positioning operations without any feedback sensor. The conventional HSM control using microprocessors and microcontrollers have limitations like sequential program processing, increased delay etc. which makes real time control a burden. The objective of this paper is to design and implement a cost effective multipurpose real-time controller using a single Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platform for HSM. The Parallel processing power of FPGA is utilized here to implement multiple stepper motor controls. Hence, this work focuses on the hardware design and implementation of a high performance FPGA based algorithm developed using Very High Speed Integrated Circuit Hardware Description Language (VHDL) coded in Xilinx ISE, simulated and verified in ModelSim software which controls the HSM through driver circuit with dual H-bridges which provides simultaneous real-time control over speed, position, no of steps, switching modes and direction of the stepper motor within the motor constraints according to the input control logic given by the user. KeywordsStepper motor, Hybrid stepper motor, FPGA, VHDL,