1. Introduction

The reconfigurable logic in industries opened countless opportunities especially in the field of control and automation. This technology facilitates the implementation of complex control algorithms with fast response.

Nowadays, the control system engineers require new tools for creating better electronic design for automation systems. Some modern tools that are available on the market allow the designer to create, simulate, and verify the desired hardware design. This can help in the evaluation of the complex system designs with fewer resources.

Among modern tools used by the controllers, the field programmable gate array (FPGA) provides a shorter processing time than the conventional methods like microprocessor- or

microcontroller-based designs. Furthermore, it has benefits such as improved accuracy and efficiency of the algorithms.

In the industry, the FPGA technology began to be used by the designers in areas like telecommunications, signal processing, image processing, and control systems such as robotic arms and assembly lines. Later, this technology began to be utilized in applications where the fast processing of information is desired, such as medical equipment, robotics, aeronautics, etc. [1].

Proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is one of the most commonly used design, due to its simple design and its robustness with respect to the parameter uncertainty [2–4]. They are usually used in the speed controlling applications of direct current or permanent magnet motors, through pulse-width modulation (PWM) pulses [5], output current, voltage, or frequency. It is possible to find out in the scientific literature PID implementations on hardware [6–8] whose authors have demonstrate the effectiveness of their designs; however, most of these implementations are not easy to develop and for some cases they are destined to be implemented only in some FPGA families.

In order to enhance the designer experience, the FPGA card manufacturers incorporate multicore processors equipped with flash memory into their designs for enhancing the computing capacity and data parallel processing. In this way, the controllers can implement functions that require fast processing in hardware and computationally intensive algorithms into the processor.

Implementing functions into the FPGA chip, the platforms that are available on the market works with HDL codes, which decreases hardware resource use and therefore, at the same time, reduces the cost and energy consumption of the system. Moreover, these platforms manage simulators for assessment of the design before its implementation.

Section 2 of this chapter is related to the digital controllers, which describes the PID and other controllers in discrete form. Section 3 provides the hardware description of the PID controller in VHDL language, and finally, the fourth section provides the simulation and experimental validation, which demonstrates how to perform numerical simulations using Simulink and Modelsim. Furthermore, an experimental validation on a DC motor system is also provided.
