A flexible rapid-prototyping system for digital-controlled high power converters

Although digital controllers offer an obvious benefit to power electronic designers they are far from perfect. In some cases moving from an analog to digital controller just trades one set of design problems for another. Fixed-point controllers require work on the front end to determine scaling factors, and if the right debug tools are not available, then information about the system can be hidden from the designer. In this paper we illustrate a system for using a MATLAB target PC in a closed-loop as a controller for a power electronics circuit. The key piece is our power interface board, which uses an FPGA to pass data from the power system to MATLAB´s controller, and then from MATLAB back to the converter. We demonstrates the unparalleled ease with which controllers can be developed using this system and will give examples of the complex systems it is capable of producing