Design and Implementation of FPGA Based Bipolar Stepper Motor Controller for Linear Slide Application

Abstract

Stepper motor is a common linear actuator in automation. This motor is used in the design of one axis automated cutter motion control with a linear slide. The cutter required a high precision motion and location control to avoid miss-cut condition. With the advantage of parallelism of FPGA, a precise stepper motor control signal is generated to drive the stepper motor. Concurrent logic circuit in FPGA calculated the distance and direction of motion in synchronize mode. Trapezoidal velocity profile and motion control are implemented using finite state machine (FSM) in FPGA. The distance resolution per step achieved in this study is 15.88µm for 8-microstep configuration. The FPGA stepper motor controller consumes only 1 % logic source on Altera DE2 FPGA board.