This paper presents the hardware design, software architecture and workflow for rapid control prototyping intended for a wide-range of power electronics based systems. The proposed system is especially useful for computationally intensive algorithms and applications with high demands on the number of required measurements and gate signals. The focus is on a heterogeneous system architecture with minimized latency and jitter as well as a high signal integrity. The software architecture enables a simple, fast and performance driven implementation. A combination of carrier board and exchangeable interfacing adapter boards allows to control a wide range of power electronics applications and converters, i.e., starting with a single switching device, converters with one or several voltage levels and one or several phase legs, up to large modular multilevel converters for grid-tied connection or variable speed drives.
This paper presents two rapid control prototyping (RCP) use cases facilitated by the open-source platform UltraZohm. The openly available UltraZohm development frame-
work eases the transition from simulation to the test bench. The framework offers the integration of automatic code generation for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), either by using Simulink models based on the HDL Coder, or by synthesizing C++ code into VHDL via the Vivado high-level synthesis tool. The first use case focuses on the implementation details of an on-chip controller-in-the-loop setup, where a permanent magnetsynchronous machine is emulated in the FPGA with a sampling frequency of 2 MHz. The second use case presents an efficient real-time implemen-tation of the sphere decoding algorithm employed to solve the long-horizon finite control set model predictive control problem for a three-level neutral point clamped inverter driving an induction machine. Experimental results based on a small-scale prototype confirm that the algorithm can be executed in real time on the FPGA, with an execution time of a few tens of microseconds. Both use cases highlight the benefits of using a high-performance RCP platform for research in power electronics and their control.
