A hardware/software co-simulation approach for power converter firmware design and debugging

This paper presents a hardware/software co-simulation approach to rapidly develop and validate processor firmware for modern power electronic converters. The methodology models in precise detail all significant electronic circuitry of the target power converter, and then executes the actual software source code of the physical digital signal processor in the simulation environment. This creates a near real-world firmware debugging capability that saves considerable code development time while still being safe to execute. The approach has been used by research students and undergraduate/postgraduate students to develop firmware for a wide variety of power electronic converter applications. Matching simulation and experimental results of an exemplary single-phase active rectifier application are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.