• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.4
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• pp.1167-1175
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• 2021

The process of automation and monitoring in industrial control system involves the use of many types of sensors. A programmable logic controller plays an important role in the automation of the different processes in the power plant system. The major control units are boiler for temperature and pressure, turbine for speed of motor, generator for voltage, conveyer belt for fuel. The power plant units are controlled using microcontrollers and PLCs, but FPGA can be the feasible solution. The paper focused on the design and simulation of hardware chip to monitor boiler, turbine, generator and conveyer belt. The hardware chip of the plant is designed in Xilinx Vivado Simulator 17.4 software using VHDL programming. The methodology includes VHDL code design, simulation, verification and testing on Virtex-5 FPGA hardware. The system has four independent buzzers used to indicate the status of the boiler, generator, turbine motor and conveyer belt in on/off conditions respectively. The GSM is used to display corresponding message on the mobile to know the status of the device in on/off condition. The system is very much helpful for the industries working on plant automation with FPGA hardware integration.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.8
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• pp.2366-2380
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• 2024

In this study, a high-speed template matching system is proposed for wafer-vision alignment. The proposed system is designed to rapidly locate markers in semiconductor equipment used for wafer-vision alignment. We optimized and implemented a template-matching algorithm for the high-speed processing of high-resolution wafer images. Owing to the simplicity of wafer markers, we removed unnecessary components in the algorithm and designed the system using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to implement high-speed processing. The hardware blocks were designed using the Xilinx ZCU104 board, and the pyramid and matching blocks were designed using programmable logic for accelerated operations. To validate the proposed system, we established a verification environment using stage equipment commonly used in industrial settings and reference-software-based validation frameworks. The output results from the FPGA were transmitted to the wafer-alignment controller for system verification. The proposed system reduced the data-processing time by approximately 30% and achieved a level of accuracy in detecting wafer markers that was comparable to that achieved by reference software, with minimal deviation. This system can be used to increase precision and productivity during semiconductor manufacturing processes.

• 제어로봇시스템학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2004.08a
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• pp.1732-1737
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• 2004

This paper proposes Internet-based checking technique for machine-tools with variant CNC (Computerized Numerical Controller). According to the architecture of CNC, CNC is classified into two types such as CAC (Closed Architecture Controller) which is conventional CNC, and OAC (Open Architecture Controller) which is a recently introduced PC-based controller. CAC has a closed architecture and it is dependent on CNC vender specification. Because of this, it has been very difficult for users to implement an application programs in CNC domain. Therefore, an additionally special module is required for Internet-based application such as remote checking. In this case, web I/O embedded module can be efficiently applied for Internet-based checking. The module is directly attached to TCP/IP network for communication. In order to obtain the monitoring data of CNC machines, the I/O signals of the module are assigned to PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) input and output (I/O) signals within CNC domain. On the other hand, OAC has a PC-based open architecture and an additional module is not necessary for the connection with external site. Because of this, a simple DAU is just used for signal sensing and data acquisition without additional communication modules. For Internet-based remote checking of machine-tools with OAC, a user-defined daemon and application programs are implemented as the form of internal function within the PC-based controller. Internet communication is performed between the daemon program in CNC domain and web script programs in external server. Checking points defined in this research are classified into two categories such as structured point and operational point. The formal includes the vibration of bearing, temperature of spindle unit and another periodical management. And the latter includes oil checking, clamp locking/unlocking and machining on/off status.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SC
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• v.39 no.3
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• pp.228-238
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• 2002

This paper presents a digital controller of the electronic ballast using high frequency modulation method for the metal halide lamp. The proposed controller includes the control algorithm for soft starting, no load protection, over current protection and power control. The proposed digital controller, moreover, has the high frequency modulation scheme and the tracking algorithm to avoid acoustic resonance phenomena. For the math production with the low cost using the ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuit), the proposed digital controller has been designed with the FPGAs(Field Programmable Gate array) only, without any microprocessor. In this paper, the detail digital control algorithms are described and the experimental results of prototype 150w metal halide electronic ballast are presented.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.3
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• pp.355-366
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• 2022

This paper proposes a microcode-based neural network accelerator controller for artificial intelligence accelerators that can be reconstructed using a programmable architecture and provide the advantages of low-power and ultra-small chip size. In order for the target accelerator to support various neural network models, the neural network model can be converted into microcode through microcode compiler and mounted on accelerator to control the operators of the accelerator such as datapath and memory access. While the proposed controller and accelerator can run various CNN models, in this paper, we tested them using the YOLOv2-Tiny CNN model. Using a system clock of 200 MHz, the Controller and accelerator achieved an inference time of 137.9 ms/image for VOC 2012 dataset to detect object, 99.5ms/image for mask detection dataset to detect wearing mask. When implementing an accelerator equipped with the proposed controller as a silicon chip, the gate count is 618,388, which corresponds to 65.5% reduction in chip area compared with an accelerator employing a CPU-based controller (RISC-V).

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.149-161
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• 2008

As Programmable Logic Controllers(PLCs) are frequently used to implement real-time safety critical software, testing of PLC software is getting more important. We propose a structural testing technique on Function Block Diagram(FBD) which is one of the PLC programming languages. In order to test FBD networks, we define templates for function blocks including timer function blocks and propose an algorithm based on the templates to transform a unit FBD into a flowgraph. We generate test cases by applying existing testing techniques to the generated flowgraph. While the existing FBD testing technique do not consider infernal structure of FBD to generate test cases and can be applied only to FBD from which the specific intermediate model can be generated, this approach has advantages of systematic test case generation considering infernal structure of FBD and applicability to any FBD without regard to its intermediate format. Especially, the proposed method enables FBD networks including timer function blocks to be tested thoroughly. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we use trip logic of bistable processor of digital nuclear power plant protection systems which is being developed in Korea.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.601-606
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• 2017

SRAM-based FPGAs mainly used to develop and implement high-performance circuits have SRAM-type configuration memory. Soft errors in memory devices are the main threat from a reliability point of view. Soft errors occurring in the configuration memory of FPGAs cause FPGAs to malfunction. SEM(Soft Error Mitigation) Controllers offered by Xilinx can mitigate the influence of soft errors in configuration memory. SEM Controllers use ECC(Error Correction Code) and CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Code) which are placed around the configuration memory to detect and correct the errors. The correction is done through a partial reconfiguration process. This paper presents the availability analysis of SRAM-based FPGAs against soft errors under the protection of SEM Controllers. Availability functions were derived and compared according to the correction capability of SEM Controllers of several different families of FPGAs. The result may help select an SRAM-based FPGA part and estimate the availability of FPGAs running in an environment where soft errors occur.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.168-175
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• 2013

The delay times due to the propagating of data on PCB depend on the shape and length of interconnection lines when memory controllers and high speed memories are soldered on the PCB. The dependency on the placement and routing on the PCB requires redesign of I/O logic or reconfiguration of the memory controller after the delay time is measured if the controller is programmable. In this paper, we propose architecture of configuring logic for the delay time estimation by writing and reading test patterns while initializing the memories. The configuration logic writes test patterns to the memory and reads them by changing timing until the correct patterns are read. The timing information is stored and the configuration logic configures the memory controller at the end of initialization. The proposed method enables easy design of systems using PCB by solving the problem of the mismatching caused by the variation of placement and routing of components including memories and memory controllers. The proposed method can be applied to high speed SRAM, DRAM, and flash memory.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.28 no.4B
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• pp.298-305
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• 2003

In this paper, we proposed a high performance lookup controller for IP packet forwarding engine of ATM based label edge routers. The lookup controller is designed to provide services such as MPLS, VPN, ELL, and RT services as well as the best effort. For high speed searching for IP addresses, we employed a TCAM based hardware search device not using traditional algorithmic approaches. We also implement lookup control functions into FPGA for fast processing of packet header and lookup control. The proposed lookup controller is designed to support differenciated services for users and to process in pipelined mechanism for performance improvement. A two-step search scheme is also applied to perform lookup for the key combined with multi-field of packet header. We found that the proposed lookup controller provides the performance of about 16M packets per second through simulations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2019.05a
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• pp.464-466
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• 2019

Controllers used in nuclear power plants require high reliability. A controller including a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and a Complex Programmable Logic Device (referred to hereinafter as FPGA) has been applied to many Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) in the past, including the APR1400 (Advanced Power Reactor 1400), a Korean digital nuclear power plant. Initially, the FPGA was considered as a general IC (Integrated Circuit) and verified only by device verification and performance testing. In the 1990s, research on FPGA verification began, and until the FPGA became a chip, it was regarded as software and the software Verification and Validation (V&V) using IEEE 1012-2004 was implemented. Currently, IEC 62566, which is a European standard, has been applied for a lot of verification. This method has been evaluated as the most sensible method to date. This is because the method of verifying the characteristics of SoC (System on Chip), which has been a problem in the existing verification method, is sufficiently applied. However, IEC 62566 is a European standard that has not yet been adopted in the United States and maintains the application of IEEE 1012 for FPGA. IEEE 1012-2004 or IEC 62566 is a technical standard. In practice, various methods are applied to meet technical standards. In this paper, we describe the procedure and important points of verification method of Nuclear Safety Class FPGA applying SoC verification method.