Synthesizable Fixed-Point Model of a Voice Coil Motor Driver for FPGA Emulation

As the need for the validation of mixed-signal systems such as Voice Coil Motor (VCM) drivers increases, verifying analog–digital interactions early in the design flow has become essential. Pure analog simulations are often too slow for system-level analysis, and their limitations pose significant challenges for designers. Digital logic models of analog circuits deployed and run on FPGA can provide immediate feedback and enable real-time verification. However, such validation requires synthesizable RTL models, whereas existing behavioral descriptions such as Verilog-A are not synthesizable and therefore unsuitable for FPGA execution. This work presents a fixed-point, synthesizable digital model of a VCM driver manually encoded in RTL, derived from its governing analog equations and deployed onto an FPGA platform for real-time emulation. In particular, the implementation of sub-blocks is discussed in detail to illustrate the translation of key fixed-point principles into hardware. Area results in FPGA are then quantified and compared to a previous implementation of the same functionality with an automated real-number RTL generation flow with the SVREAL library, showing significant area gains.