A Study on the Reactor Protection System Composed of ASICs

The potential value of the Application Specific Integrated Circuits(ASIC's) in safety systems of Nuclear Power Plants(NPP's) is being increasingly recognized because they are essentially hardwired circuitry on a chip, the reliability of the system can be proved more easily than that of software based systems which is difficult in point of software V&V(Verification and Validation). There are two types of ASIC, one is a full customized type, the other is a half customized type. PLD(Programmable Logic Device) used in this paper is a half customized ASIC which is a device consisting of blocks of logic connected with programmable interconnections that are customized in the package by end users. This paper describes the RPS(Reactor Protection System) composed of ASICs which provides emergency shutdown of the reactor to protect the core and the pressure boundary of RCS(Reactor Coolant System) in NPP's. The RPS is largely composed of five logic blocks, each of them was implemented in one PLD, as the followings. A). Bistable Logic B). Matrix Logic C).Initiation Logic D). MMI(Man Machine Interface) Logic E). Test Logic.