The design and realization of a DSP-based power electronic circuit real-time simulator

In order to design a high performance power electronics circuit, a precise simulation environment is essential for the controller design. In this paper, a power electronic circuit real-time simulator was designed and realized on a DSP chip. The dynamic equations of a power electronics circuit were coded on a Texas Instruments (TI) made C6416 fixed point DSP. Meanwhile, the interrupt interface of the DSP was used to capture the pulse-width modulation (PWM) signal. Thus, the switching waveforms can be computed by a single DSP chip. To output the obtained waveforms in real-time, the SIGNALWARE ORS-114 AD/DA card was interfaced with the DSP chip by the direct memory access (DMA) channel. Thus, the circuit equation computations and the DAC output operations can be achieved in parallel. Finally, the designed simulator is used to simulate a 50 kHz switching power supply and controlled by a TI C2808 DSP controller. The results show that the proposed hardware simulator can achieve better responses than the conventional software simulators.