A DEVELOPMENT TOOL FOR ANALOG FUZZY CONTROLLERS - FEATURES AND APPLICATIONS

This paper describes an integrated development tool for analog fuzzy c ontrollers which exploits analog hardware implementation and fuzzy log ic flexibility to allow an easy and extremely low-cost synthesis of no n-linear control laws. The core of the final implementation is a modul ar general-purpose analog fuzzy engine (AFE) with good speed performan ce and built-in temperature compensation. To ease field prototyping, a digitally-programmable version of AFE is provided with a software lay er computing the biasing voltages needed by the circuit to fit numeric al data and/or linguistic rules specified by the users. Once that the application is fine-tuned, a further software module is able to genera te an optimized version of AFE dedicated to the task. An example appli cation shows that this approach can lead to the implementation of effe ctive analog controllers fulfilling industrial requirements.