UltraZohm—An Open-Source Rapid Control Prototyping Platform for Power Electronic Systems

Abstract

This paper presents two rapid control prototyping (RCP) use cases facilitated by the open-source platform UltraZohm. The openly available UltraZohm development framework eases the transition from simulation to the test bench. The framework offers the integration of automatic code generation for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), either by using Simulink models based on the HDL Coder, or by synthesizing C++ code into VHDL via the Vivado high-level synthesis tool. The first use case focuses on the implementation details of an on-chip controller-in-the-loop setup, where a permanent magnet synchronous machine is emulated in the FPGA with a sampling frequency of 2 MHz. The second use case presents an efficient real-time implementation of the sphere decoding algorithm employed to solve the long-horizon finite control set model predictive control problem for a three-level neutral point clamped inverter driving an induction machine. Experimental results based on a small-scale prototype confirm that the algorithm can be executed in real time on the FPGA, with an execution time of a few tens of microseconds. Both use cases highlight the benefits of using a high-performance RCP platform for research in power electronics and their control.