Reconfigurable Hardware Based Programmable Digital Circuit Design for a Rotational Stepper Motor

Abstract

Abstract In this research, a hardware digital circuit was designed for a programmable rotational stepper motor using VHDL as a design tool and the FPGA as a target technology. The design is implemented on a Spartan 3 starter kit (supported with XC3S200 field programmable gate array). The 50 MHz provided by the starter kit is divided to obtain the necessary delay time between the motor phases that ranges between 2-10 m seconds. Through output selections, the direction of rotation of the stepper motor besides the magnitude of the angle of movement and the rotation speed can be controlled. The advantage of using reconfigurable hardware (FPGA) instead of a discrete digital component is that the designer can make modifications to the design easily and quickly, and the total design represents an embedded system (which works without computer). The total programmable hardware design that make control on the stepper motor movement, occupy an area that did not exceed 12% of the chip resources.Keywords: Stepper Motor, Motion control, FPGA.