Rapidly Design, Prototype, and Test your DSP Controller with PSIM and Typhoon HIL

The growing complexity of power electronics (PE) systems, intensifying competition, rapidly shrinking product development cycles, and exploding test and quality assurance costs are forcing power electronics industry to accelerate the adoption of advanced tools for design, test, and verification. This trend is particularly evident in power electronics embedded control software whose size, complexity and importance is rapidly increasing. This is only to be expected because power electronics control software: • Provides large value added to the product via increased functionality and new features; • Provides an opportunity to quickly develop new products based on existing hardware platforms; (i.e. using solar inverter power hardware for grid storage power hardware); • Provides the opportunity for newcomers to offer competitive solutions in different verticals thanks to the availability of modularized hardware. If automotive industry can be taken as an indication of how the power electronics is going to develop, we should brace ourselves for a software dominated power electronics. For example, today’s car has between 20 and 70 processors with 100 million lines of embedded code amounting to approximately 1GByte of embedded code. Less than 20 years ago cars had one or no processors. Testing automotive embedded software then was much simpler. Manual testing was acceptable, as it is still the standard practice in most of the power electronics industry today. But times are rapidly changing. In addition, power electronics industry is currently undergoing a power semiconductor revolution with the development of new wide-bandgap semiconductor devices, i.e. SiC, GaN, which are imposing more demanding design requirement specifications for controllers which in turn require a new set of tools for automated design, test, and verification.