A Framework for the Development and Monitoring of Digital Control in Power Converters

The design of advanced digital controllers for power converters requires dedicated hardware which may result in increased complexity and development time. As the number of control variables increases, operations such as monitoring, debugging, testing and optimization become more difficult. The paper presents a methodology and a prototype of a system that have facilitated non-invasive monitoring of the controller of power converter in real-time and performing more effective automated tests. This has been achieved by leveraging the tremendous reconfigurability of modern System-on-Chip (SoC) devices that integrate both Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and high-performance standard Hard Processor System (HPS) in one package with built-in, programmable interconnects. In this proposed architecture, FPGA section implements digital controller and HPS handles monitoring and interfacing for remote supervision by re-using standard Linux system libraries. The monitoring system sets the controller parameters, collects all internal controller signals and organizes them. It provides an interface through ethernet for external data processing environments such as MATLAB© or Python, which in turn allows to integrate other instrumentation sources in order to execute automated tasks. This paper will also present the application of the proposed methodology to the investigation of the quantization-induced limit cycles in converters.