Accelerator for Real-Time Emulation of Modular-Multilevel-Converter Using FPGA

The development of an accurate Real-Time emulation system for Modular-Multilevel-Converter (MMC) is a challenging task due to the presence of a large number of sub-modules (SMs). This paper explains the strategies to implement the MMC model in real-time, with up to 1600 SMs in each arm, by exploiting the available arm-level and SM-level parallelism using FPGA. Computations are made more parallel by decomposing the converter equivalent model into two multiports for further analysis. Our 200 MHz custom model with 1600 SMs/arm on the ZCU104 board yields a speedup of up to 6.03 as compared to the 1.2 GHz on-chip A53 ARM processor. Also with our 400 SMs/arm, the latency could be reduced to 7.27μs as compared to the 9μs reported in the literature. Accuracy is verified by comparing with the MATLAB-Simulink model and observed that the percentage error in the load current is less than 1%.