摘要：As the ASIC design cost becomes affordable only for very large-scale productions, the FPGA technology is currently becoming the leading technology for those applications that require a small-scale production. FPGAs can be considered as a technology crossing between hardware and software. Only a small-number of standards for the design of safety-critical systems give guidelines and recommendations that take the peculiarities of the FPGA technology into consideration. The main contribution of this paper is an overview of the existing design standards that regulate the design and verification of FPCA-based systems in safety-critical application fields. Moreover, the paper proposes a survey of significant published research proposals and existing industrial guidelines about the topic, and collects and reports about some lessons learned from industrial and research projects involving the use of FPGA devices.

摘要：Currently, the design and operation criteria for electrical distribution networks are fastly changing due to some factors;among these, the progressive penetration of distributed Generation (DG) is destined to cause deep changes in the existing networks, no longer considered as passive terminations of the whole electrical system. Moreover, the increasing application of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) will allow the implementation of the so called “smart grids”, determining new interesting scenarios. In the paper the problems and the potential benefits of DG, the possible new electrical distribution system models and the major research projects on smart grids are faced and reported.

摘要：Photovoltaic (PV) systems have attracted increasing attention in last years as well as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which have been used in many application fields. In PV plants, especially in ground installations, a lot of thefts and damages occur due to the still high cost of the modules. A new experimental WSN ad-hoc has been designed to be an anti-theft alarm system. Each node of the network is directly installed under each PV string and it is equipped with an accelerometer sensor capable to detect a minimum displacement of the panel from its steady position. The WSN presents a star topology: a master node cyclically interrogates the slave nodes through RF link. It collects all the nodes responses and communicates though a RS-232 interface with a control PC checking the network status. When a slave node detects an alarm, continuous messages are sent to the control PC which turns on all the alarm signaling systems. The control PC is equipped with an open source operative system and software and provides for SMS, e-mail and sound-light signaling in case of alarm. It also communicates with a remote server where all the WSN information is stored. A first low cost experimental WSN has been already installed and it is working properly.