Naotaka Oda

Application of FPGA to Nuclear Power Plant I&C Systems

This paper presents a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) application for nuclear power plants, and introduces Toshiba FPGA-based Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems as typical examples. An FPGA is a semiconductor device including more than thousands of logic gates which can be connected to constitute application specific circuits. A notable feature of FPGA is its simplicity. Thanks to this feature, several companies including Toshiba have developed FPGA based-systems for nuclear power plants recently. The simplicity of FPGAs is one of the most notable advantages to provide cost-effective options for I&C systems, ensuring reliable and safe operation of nuclear power plants.

Development of FPGA-Based Safety-Related I&C Systems

Toshiba has developed FPGA-based systems which perform signal processing by field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) for safety-related I&C systems. FPGA is a device which consists only of defined digital circuit: hardware, which performs defined processing. FPGA-based system solves issues existing both in the conventional systems operated by analog circuits (analog-based system) and the systems operated by central processing units (CPU-based system). The advantages of applying FPGA are to keep the long-life supply of products, improving testability (verification), and to reduce the drift which may occur in analog-based system. Considering application to safety-related systems, nonvolatile and non rewritable FPGA which is impossible to be changed after once manufactured has been adopted in Toshiba FPGA-based system. The systems which Toshiba developed this time are Power range Monitor (PRM) and Trip Module (TM). These systems are compatible with the conventional analog-based systems and the CPU-based systems. Therefore, requested cost for upgrading will be minimized. Toshiba is planning to expand application of FPGA-based technology by adopting this development method to the other safety-related systems from now on.Copyright