HW-SW Real-Time Operating system for AC drive applications

This paper deals with the management of a SoC-based current controller using an efficient Real-Time Operating System (RTOS). To accelerate the services of this operating system, a Real-Time Unit (RTU) was developed in VHDL and associated to the RTOS. It consists in hardware operating system that moves the scheduling and communication process from software RTOS to hardware. Thus, a significant acceleration has been achieved. The experimental tests based on a digital current controller for AC drives were also carried out using a laboratory set-up and a Virtex-5 board. This latter includes a soft-core processor “Microblaze”. The obtained results prove the interest of the proposed approach.