A new control architecture for future distributed power electronics systems

This paper proposes a novel open-architecture approach to the design of digital controller hardware for power electronics systems. The paper discusses the benefits of such an approach and compares it to the more conventional centralized controller approach. Prototypes of the three key open-architecture functional blocks: high-speed serial communication link, hardware manager and application manager were built in order to test their performance on a representative three-phase 100 kVA converter. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.