Design and implementation of a multi-axis motion controller using SoPC technology

摘要

Development of a multi-axis motion control system with a compact size has become a popular trend in the world. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to implement a multi-axis servo controller and the motion trajectory planning within one chip. At first, SoPC (System on a Programmable Chip) technology, which is composed of an Altera FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) chip and an embedded soft-core Nios II processor, is taken to develop the multi-axis motion controller. The proposed multi-axis motion control IC has two modules. The first module is an embedded soft-core Nios II processor which is used to realize the motion trajectory planning by software which includes step position response, circular motion trajectory, helicoid motion trajectory, etc. The second module is presented to realize the multi-PMSM's position/speed/current controllers by hardware. And VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language) is applied to describe the overall multi-axis controller behavior. Therefore, a fully digital multi-axis motion controller will be implemented by a single FPGA chip. Because FPGA have the advantages of fast computation, parallel processing and software-hardware co-design, it will apparently improve the performance of the multi-axis motion control system. Finally, to verify the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed multi-axis motion control IP, a three-axis motion platform (XYZ table) is constructed and some experimental results are presented.