Virtual prototyping of universal control architecture systems by means of processor in the loop technology

This paper presents the use of virtual prototyping and processor in the loop (PIL) technology for the design and synthesis of digital control systems for power electronics applications. Specifically, the proposed method simulates the converter power stage using Virtual Test Bed (VTB) and controls it using the actual converter digital controller-a hybrid DSP/FPGA control system-interfaced through the PCI bus of the host computer. The paper presents the VTB PIL model developed as interface, the PIL simulation strategy, and experimental PIL simulations results with a three-phase power converter modeled in VTB. From these results the great flexibility attained by the proposed design methodology is ascertained.