A. System Requirements and Preliminary Design
During the first development stage, the system requirements have to be established under the form of specifications.The system specifications must be as detailed as possible since the subsequent stages will depend on them.The specifications concern not only the functions that the motion control system has to accomplish but also the performance it must provide. The functional specifications must detail the control strategy and configuration as well as the different control and regulation tasks that the control system has to accomplish. The major performance specifications of a motion control system concern the response time, the response accuracy, and the communication interface.
The system specifications will permit the engineer to achieve his preliminary design and proceed to the selection of one or many appropriate microprocessors capable to accomplish the required tasks. Processor selection is a major task that requires a good knowledge of the desired functions and the performance of the final system.
If an ASIC or an ASIC chips set is selected instead of commercially available processors, it will be necessary to design the ASIC’s considering the desired system functions.