Verification of control design and implementation for power supplies by FPGA-in-the-loop simulation

In many power electronic applications, building a power converter and/or a testing setup/facility for its evaluation can be expensive and time consuming. The development cycle in such applications can be accelerated by verifying the control design and implementation without building the power converter, i.e., by emulating the converter in real-time or non-real time simulations. In this paper, an overview of different approaches for verification of control design and implementation by emulating the power converter is provided. In addition, an FPGA-in-the-loop (FIL) simulation is presented to verify the control design and implementation for a gradient power supply for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) applications. In FIL simulations, the control is implemented with an FPGA which operates in real-time, whereas, the power converter is simulated in Simulink which operates in non-real time. Therefore, for proper FIL simulation, the operation of the FPGA must be synchronized with Simulink. The communication between the FPGA and Simulink to achieve synchronization is described in details. Finally, the FIL simulation results are compared to results obtained with model-in-the-loop (MIL) simulation, where both power converter and control are simulated in Simulink.