A Study of NMEA 2000 Protocol Application for Ship Electrical Power Converter Monitoring System

In this paper, the FPGA-based SoC board (Xilinx Virtex-4 ML401 EVM) is adopted to control electrical power inverter system. For marine application, its performance is shown on PC-based system for monitoring electrical characteristics of a power inverter using by the NMEA 2000 protocol. This power inverter system is achieved in Real-Time monitoring and control by dual micro-processor operation on embedded FPGA-based SoC board. One micro processor is for control (Control processor) electrical power inverter using by PWM signal. And the other microprocessor (Communication processor) is for communication with PC-based monitoring system. The two-processor is communicating each other using by dual-port ram (DPRAM). PC-based system user can control and monitor information of the electrical power inverter via NMEA 2000 based communication processor. Control and monitoring information includes the inverter status and configuration. SoC board converts this information to Parameter Group Numbers (PGNs) in the NMEA 2000 protocol. This system can be applied to marine power electronics for distributed power generation, transmission or regulation systems on the ship.