Active vibration reduction by means of a low-cost FPGA device

This paper deals with the implementation of a low-cost FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) device as a controller for active vibration attenuation. The aim of the work is to present the main advantages and drawbacks of this device with respect to the traditionally adopted Digital Signal Processors (DSP). It is shown that the main advantage is the high calculation speed offered by the FPGA technology. On the other hand the main disadvantage is related to the low available memory space. Furthermore the control algorithm has to be implemented using fixed point mathematics, which is much more complicated if compared to the adoption of the floating point one. The numerical operations which have to be adopted to overcome the problems related to the controller implementation by means of fixed point mathematics are presented and commented. Finally some experimental tests are presented to show in which cases this lowcost FPGA device can offer advantages with respect to DSPs. © 2008 by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Department of Mechanical Engineering All rights reserved.