FPGA-Based Reconfigurable PWM Generator for Power Electronic Converter Applications

Application of digital hardware based on FPGA in power electronic converters control systems has grew up in recent years. One of the most important issues in hardware implementation of power converters controller systems is the PWM signal generation. This issue is more important in case of multi-level converters with several carries. Implementation of these types of PWM strategies with conventional PWM peripherals in existing DSPs and microcontroller is very complicated and sometimes impossible, because existing PWM generation peripherals are based on single carrier and optimized for two-level inverter applications. This paper presents a multi-carrier-based generalized reconfigurable PWM generator hardware that can be used in power electronic converters control systems. The proposed hardware can be implemented on both FPGA and ASIC as a peripheral for a main processor. The proposed architecture can be easily configured to support several PWM strategies including conventional single-carrier and novel multi-carrier PWM techniques. The proposed hardware includes output control and programmable dead-band generator module as well. The system function selection and other configurations can be carried out using dedicated control and configuration registers. Whole architecture and internal modules are designed and implemented in Verilog HDL and simulated then synthesized and tested successfully on Altera Cyclone II FPGA using FPGA development board and laboratory prototypes. Simulation and experimental results for various types of modulation strategies are presented verifying generality and reconfigurability of the proposed hardware. © 2017, Brazilian Society for Automatics--SBA.