Abstract
This report gives a brief overview of various technologies for control of power electronics converters. General FPGA technology, with emphasis on the Xilinx Virtex 5 family is introduced. A Virtex 5 FPGA based processor board developed by Sintef Energy Research is presented. Examples of applications using this board are presented. FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) are large programmable logic devices, consisting of a matrix of logic cells and an interconnection fabric. A wide range of digital circuitry can be implemented in a FPGA. A single FPGA chip can contain a complete microcontroller system with processor core, memory and custom made interface circuitry. A FPGA based processor board for control of power electronics converters has been developed. It is designed as a general purpose building block that can be used in a wide range of applications.The main features are:• FPGA: Xilinx Virtex 5 FX 30T, which has an embedded PowerPC processor core.• Large amount of memory: 250 MB DRAM, 128 MB Flash, 64 kB EEPROM.• Fast AD converter: 8x 12 bit, 40 MHz simultaneous sampling. The FPGA based processor board can handle converter control methods where parallel signal processing circuitry performs instantaneous current control, or performs online inductance and induced voltage measurements. It can be used in a wide range of other applications too, as a general purpose processor system capable of running Linux, as an online overharmonics and interharmonics mains voltage detector, and a power circuit component emulator.