A modern, versatile and low cost educational system for teaching DC/DC converter control with analog, digital and mixed-signal methods

This paper presents an educational system for practical laboratory experiments accompanying an introductory course in power electronics. The lab setup is comprised of a printed circuit board with a half-bridge topology which can be used either as buck or as boost converter and a low cost microcontroller evaluation kit. Control of the DC/DC converter is based on a programmable system on a chip (PSoC) microcontroller. Therefore the platform is very versatile in implementing analog as well as modern digital or combined mixed-signal control methods at low cost. Due to the design of the board and the use of the PSoC microcontroller mainly configuration/software changes are necessary when changing the control method and only small hardware modifications are needed; For instance to implement digital control loops no modification is needed; For analog voltage mode just some external components for the feedback compensation network and one capacitor for PWM generation are added. The board can be used for teaching basic operation of DC/DC converters and analog control (e.g. analog voltage and current mode control), but also for advanced topics like digital control, efficiency optimization and geometric control.