An experimental comparison of proportional-integral, sliding mode, and robust adaptive control for piezoactuated nanopositioning stages Rev. Sci. Instrum. 85, 055112 (2014) ; 10.1063/1.4876596 Robust adaptive variable speed control of wind power systems without wind speed measurement J. Renewable Sustainable Energy 5, 063115 (2013); 10.1063/1.4840035 Digital control of force microscope cantilevers using a field programmable gate array Rev. Sci. Instrum. 79, 123705 (2008); 10.1063/1.3043432

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... al field programmable gate array-based lock-in amplifier for high-performance photon counting applications Rev. Sci. Instrum. 76, 093112 (2005); This paper aims at control design and its implementation for robust high-bandwidth precision (nanoscale) positioning systems. Even though modern model-based control theoretic designs for robust broadband high-resolution positioning have enabled orders of magnitude improvement in performance over existing model independent designs, their scope is severely limited by the inefficacies of digital implementation of the control designs. High-order control laws that result from model-based designs typically have to be approximated with reduced-order systems to facilitate digital implementation. Digital systems, even those that have very high sampling frequencies, provide low effective control bandwidth when implementing high-order systems. In this context, field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs) provide a good alternative to the use of digital-logic based processors since they enable very high implementation speeds, moreover with cheaper resources. The superior flexibility of digital systems in terms of the implementable mathematical and logical functions does not give significant edge over FPAAs when implementing linear dynamic control laws. In this paper, we pose the control design objectives for positioning systems in different configurations as optimal control problems and demonstrate significant improvements in performance when the resulting control laws are applied using FPAAs as opposed to their digital counterparts. An improvement of over 200% in positioning bandwidth is achieved over an earlier digital signal processor (DSP) based implementation for the same system and same control design, even when for the DSP-based system, the sampling frequency is about 100 times the desired positioning bandwidth. C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.