The PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) has been widely used for the development of digital control system of nuclear power plant. The PLC has high maintenance costs and increasing complexity, hence, FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based digital control system has been considered as an alternative. However, the development of FPGA based digital control system is a challenge for PLC engineers because they are required to learn about new language to develop FPGA and knowledge and know-how acquired in the development of PLC is not transferable. In this study, we proposed and implemented an automatic translation tool for translation of FBD (Function Block Diagram), a programming language of PLC software, into VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language). Automatically translating the FBD to VHDL using this tool allows PLC engineers to develop FPGA without any knowledge of the hardware description language.
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