A Survey of the Implementation of Linear Model Predictive Control on FPGAs

Over the past 20 years, great strides have been made in the real-time implementation of linear MPC on FPGA devices. Starting from initial work, which demonstrated the benefits of embedding linear MPC onto FPGAs, recent work has shown sampling rates of more than 1 MHz are possible with FPGA-based implementations. This work surveys FPGA implementations of linear MPC, with a focus on the computational architecture. This includes the choice of number representation, the parallelizations exploited and the memory architecture. We discuss the transferability of those design choices to the FPGA implementation of nonlinear MPC, and provide some future research directions related to the implementation of MPC on FPGAs.