An Integrated Software Testing Framework for FPGA-Based Controllers in Nuclear Power Plants

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have received much attention from the nuclear industry as an alternative platform to programmable logic controllers for digital instrumentation and control. The software aspect of FPGA development consists of several steps of synthesis and refinement, and also requires verification activities, such as simulations that are performed individually at each step. This study proposed an integrated software-testing framework for simulating all artifacts of the FPGA software development simultaneously and evaluating whether all artifacts work correctly using common oracle programs. This method also generates a massive number of meaningful simulation scenarios that reflect reactor shutdown logics. The experiment, which was performed on two FPGA software implementations, showed that it can dramatically save both time and costs.