Hardware

FPGA in Robotics

An FPGA (field-programmable gate array) is a reconfigurable integrated circuit whose logic fabric can be programmed to implement custom digital hardware, offering deterministic, low-latency, highly parallel processing. In robotics, FPGAs handle hard real-time workloads such as motor commutation and current loops in servo drives, encoder decoding, EtherCAT slave controllers, sensor interfacing, and low-latency vision preprocessing, often alongside CPUs in system-on-chip parts like the Xilinx Zynq family.

Why it matters for physical AI

Microsecond-deterministic motor and sensor loops cannot run on general-purpose operating systems; FPGA layers provide the timing backbone that lets higher-level learned policies assume clean, high-rate actuation and sensing.