The FPGA technology in control of Electrical Discharge Machining process

Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) is very accurate manufacturing process able to trim any desired shapes in various materials. The proposed measurement and control system comprises a stand-alone FPGA controller, EDM machine and data acquisition system (DAQ) based on standard PC. The stand-alone FPGA controller can operate in an open loop and feedback structures. It enables the interaction with a high-speed A/D converters, differential analog D/A converters and digital, differential incremental encoders inputs. In order to demonstrate the performance of a simple controller an experiments in the closed-loop of EDM system were conducted. The real-time control algorithm runs on the autonomous FPGA system which is equipped with a Spartan II chip [7]. The experimental results are shown and discussed. The unique feature of the investigated FPGA-based controller is reaction time which can be shorter than 1 microsecond.