Design of Brushless Direct Current Motor Controller Based on Altera Field Programmable Gate Array

Abstract

In recent years, the brushless direct current motor (BLDCM) is employed in various home and commercial applications due to its simple electronic control mechanism, built-in construction and high efficiency. In this paper, a novel high-frequency counter-based pulse-width modulation (HFCB-PWM) approach is adopted to digitally control the speed and direction of the brushless direct current motor.  Using digital HFCB-PWM strategy provides high-performance of the BLDCM speed controller with low computational complexity and high-speed execution in an FPGA.  The controller is designed and implemented using Cyclone IV Altera field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to drive a six-pulse three-phase bridge inverter. The HFCB-PWM strategy is characterized by its simplicity, low cost and a smaller number of FPGA logic elements (LEs) are required for pulse generation. The drive system is modelled using the Matlab/Simulink environment. The good agreements between simulation results and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed digital HFCB-PWM strategy to control the BLDC motor