Electronic Ballast Design System

In this paper will be reported the implementation of a flexible system to study electronic ballasts. The Electronic Ballast Design System (EBDS) is a microcontrolled and FPGA-based system and was developed to generate command signals to the half bridge inverter. A specific hardware using FPGA was developed to generate the switches signals command. This hardware is responsible for the autonomous frequency generation (in FM mode) and pulse width (PW) both are easily programmed by software, setting free the microcontroller for others applications. This system may be programmed using a personal computer which give us a high level of flexibility, allowing the study of different ballasts topologies, power filters, new control and dimmer techniques, as well as, acoustic resonance effect on high intensity discharge (HID) lamps. Finally, experimental results will be presented for a 250 W electronic ballast for a high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamp, however this system may be used for any kind of discharge lamps.