ABSTRACT
Taking advantage of the latest advancements in microelectronics fabrication technologies, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) vendors are continuously looking for new features to be included in their devices, aiming at making them suitable for wider application areas. Today, FPGAs are used in many different industrial applications because of their high speed and flexibility, inherent parallelism, good cost–performance trade-off, and huge variety of available specialized logic resources. One of the main impediments for a wider use of FPGAs in the industry has been the limited knowledge of the technology by nonspecialists in hardware design. Hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) is very useful, among other applications, for real-time simulation of power systems, where it allows development time, cost, and time to market to be reduced. Many existing HILS solutions are based on the use of digital signal processing (DSP) as main processing elements and FPGAs as specialized coprocessors and/or communication links.
