ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a description of the possibilities of digital control systems design technology, the methods and procedures that need to be followed in order to design and implement field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)-based systems, and selection criteria on what are the best suitable and cost-effective solutions for a given problem or application. It focuses on the context of embedded systems for industrial use, although many concepts and explanations could be also valid for other fields such as high-performance computing (HPC). Current FPGAs also include different kinds of specialized resources, such as memories and memory controllers, digital signal processing (DSP) blocks and embedded processors and commonly used peripherals, among others. Embedded control systems are, from a very general perspective, control elements that, in a somewhat autonomous manner, interact with a physical system in order to have an automated control over it.
