Pipelined Numerical Integration on Reduced Accuracy Architectures for Power System Transient Simulations

This work concerns a dedicated mixed-signal power system dynamic simulator. The equations that describe the behavior of a power system can be decoupled in a large linear system that is handled by the analog part of the hardware, and a set of differential equations. The latter are solved using numerical integration algorithms implemented in dedicated pipelines on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). This datapath is operating in a precision-starved environment since is it synthesized using fixed-point arithmetic, as well as it relies on low-precision solutions that come from the analog linear solver. In this paper, the pipelined integration scheme is presented and an assessment of different numerical integration algorithms is performed based on their effect on the final results. It is concluded that in low-precision environments higher order integration algorithms should be preferred when the timestep is large, since simpler algorithms result in unacceptable artifacts (extraneous instabilities).