Fault-resistant scheme for transmission of control and status signals in high-power inverters via optical fibres

In high power electronic equipment, control signals are often transmitted to the power semiconductors via fibre optic links. The standard signal code on the optical fibre is simple “light: semiconductor on, no light: semiconductor off”. If this code is used, transmission faults on the fibre optic link lead to uncontrolled switching of the power semiconductors. In contrast to the conventional code the described advanced transmission scheme achieves a high level of fault tolerance. In case of transmission faults it is able either to regenerate the correct signal or to switch the semiconductor controllably to a safe state. The advanced scheme applies known methods from communications theory innovatively to systems used in power electronics. The binary control signal is spread with a Barker sequence. The received signal is decoded with a correlation receiver. However, the described spread spectrum transmission system needs a higher bandwidth than the standard system, that can be interpreted as a drawback. Implementation on one ASIC per transceiving station is feasible