FPGA based Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation for Digital Control of Power Converters using VHDL-AMS

This paper presents a new approach for complex system design, allowing rapid, efficient and low-cost prototyping. Using this approach can simplify designing tasks and go faster from system modeling to effective hardware implementation. Designing multi-domain systems require different engineering competences and several tools, our approach gives a unique design environment, based on the use of VHDL-AMS modeling language and FPGA device within a single design tool. This approach is intended to enhance hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) practices with a more realistic simulation which improve the verification process in the system design flow. This paper describes the implementation of a software/hardware platform as effective support for our methodology. The feasibility and the benefits of the presented approach are demonstrated through a practical case study of a power converter control. The obtained results show that the developed method achieves significant speed-up compared with conventional simulation methods, using minimum resources and minimum latency.