Dual DSP concept for a motor controller platform used in Hardware-In-The-Loop simulation environments

The work proposes a design of a controller platform for advanced digital motor control used in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation environments. The platform is a synergistic combination of two parallel processing computing cores, where one is powerful floating point digital signal processor (DSP) used for the main computing routines and the other one is a fixed point DSP with on-chip peripherals for motor control applications. The applied software scheduling implies real-time multitasking operating system with task switching times less than 300 ns reducing the overhead to minimum possible for the given floating point DSP. The sample period of the main control cycle is arbitrary adjustable from 1 ms to up to 10 mus making the system applicable in a wide range of experimental setups. The operating system was designed to handle asynchronous read and/or write events from and to real-time workstations for HIL simulations. An application graphical user interface (GUI) based on high speed IEEE1394 data exchange provides the user with the ability to monitor and modify virtually every software variable defined as global in the control software.