Distributed Communication and Control Architecture for an Intelligent Power Stage

Communication inside a power converter could be beneficial in a variety of ways. It naturally gives hardware abstraction, meaning that the behavior of power stage terminals is independent of hardware design. Flexibility is another important communication benefit, since different data could be exchanged between a controller, the gate drivers, and sensors. Since modern gate drivers are equipped with different sensors for protection purposes, in conjunction with communication, data sampled from gate driver sensors could be sent to the controller and reused for control purposes. Therefore, fewer sensors would be needed for the system, and controller hardware could be simplified. And finally, communication between different levels and nodes in the power electronics systems allows for the implementation of distributed control. This paper gives an example of a power converter architecture that uses communication between nodes (gate drivers and the sensors) to achieve flexible and distributed control.