Study on FPGA application in the protection system of nuclear power plants

The reactor protection system in nuclear power plant is developed based on the CPU in general. It increases the likelihood of common cause failure and decreases reliability and safety of nuclear power plant since the protection system includes the operating system and the application software and so on. The different between the FPGA and the CPU is presented to illustrate the advantage of FPGA in the protection system. In addition, the critical processes are proposed to develop the reactor protection system based on FPGA. The important instructions are also summarized to test and verify the protection system based on FPGA. (authors)