A Method for Accelerating FPGA Based Digital Control of Switched Mode Power Supplies

As Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) became available in small packages and at low prices, these devices have been increasingly used to replace traditional Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) in digital control applications. Besides the considerable advantages such as parallelism, high frequency operation and great flexibility, FPGAs also come with some drawbacks. While code development time can be reduced by the use of high level synthesis tools, synthesis and implementation times drastically reduce productivity. This paper presents a novel digital platform meant to accelerate the design process of FPGA based control systems by developing a real time configurable hardware system that allows modifying the topology and the controller's parameters at run time. The design procedure proposed will be exemplified on a custom Zynq based board featuring a high performance analog interface used to control a synchronous buck converter.