FPGA Motor Simulation

May 20, 2014

Jennifer Shuttleworth

OPAL-RT Technologies offers a suite of tools to make field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based simulation accessible to engineers developing controllers for electric drives. First, a set of real-time motor models, covering a wide range of motors used for automotive applications, has been pre-packaged to run on FPGAs. According to the company, the users do not need to know how to program an FPGA for simulation; they just need to parameterize the motor appropriately using an intuitive GUI. Next, the FPGA motor-test package enables the user to create power electronics faults to validate failure-mode operation of the controller. Third, the motor simulation can be integrated with a full-vehicle simulation running on a CPU for integration with other controllers that may need to be tested. Finally, OPAL-RT provides a test automation package that allows the development of test scripts to run whole batches of test sequences.