Designing Home Appliances With FPGAs

The efficient use of electricity enables home appliances to minimize cost and preserve the environment. Most home appliances, such as refrigerators, washers and dryers, dishwashers, and air conditioners, are driven by electric motor systems. These systems include a power supply, an electric motor, motor control circuitry, and a mechanical system.

System costs and power consumption can be drastically reduced by using digital circuits, or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to control an analog motor circuit. Besides energy conservation, FPGAs also incorporate features such as embedded digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, microcontrollers, and I/O interfaces to complete a home appliance design.