GUIDELINES AND DESIGN CRITERIA FOR APPLICATION OF FPGAs IN NUCLEAR POWER PLANT IC SYSTEMS

摘要

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are gaining increased attention worldwide for application in nuclear plant instrumentation and control (I&C) systems. Use of FPGAs has the potential to reduce complexity and the associated burden of gaining regulatory approval and may provide better protection against obsolescence as compared to conventional microprocessor-based systems. This paper describes guidelines and design criteria that were recently developed by EPRI for application of FPGAs in nuclear plant I&C systems. At the previous NPIC & HMIT meeting (2010), the first phase of the EPRI project was described along with the resulting report, EPRI 1019181, which provided high-level guidance and a primer on application of FPGA technology. The guidance in that report has now been expanded to provide detailed design guidelines, criteria and suggested design approaches for a wide range of FPGA applications in nuclear plant safety and non-safety systems. The new report, EPRI 1022983, was published in June of 2011. The report provides a comprehensive set of guidelines and design criteria applicable to any FPGA-based project. These address both safety and non-safety applications and cover projects of varying size and scope, from component or circuit board level changes up to complete system replacements and designs for new plants, including potential impact of using FPGAs on the overall I&C architecture. Criteria are provided on topics such as designing for simplicity, fault tolerance and self-monitoring, use of synchronous design and other defensive design measures, verification and validation, and evaluation and selection of software tools.