Power Converters for Medium Voltage Networks, p. 153-188
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-44529-7_5
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The available microcontrollers at present can only provide about six pairs of PWM channels, which are clearly insufficient for multilevel converter systems. On the other hand, the field programmable gate array (FPGA) may provide multiple PWM generators according to the converter requirements. Unlike the digital signal processor (DSP) which runs a sequential program in its microprocessor , an FPGA may run all the operations in parallel with the clock signal. The capability of parallel processing of the FPGA affords the opportunity to the switching controller to update all gate signals simultaneously. Various design techniques and software environments are available for the modeling of switching control schemes with the FPGA technology. Most of the techniques require special software such as HDL coder, System Generator, PSIM and ModelSim, which increases the development time and cost. In this chapter, the most common software such as the MATLAB/Simulink-and Xilinx ISE-based alternative design technique is proposed, which may reduce the developmental time and cost of the switching controller.