A Low Cost Solution for Hardware-in-Loop Software Testing

The automotive industry is growing each year with major technological enhancements. One such technological enhancement is electric mobility. At early phase of product development, it is difficult for any industry to invest heavily in hardware-in-loop test setup. The paper proposes a low cost solution for hardware-in-loop systems using FPGA board for early stages of product development. Based on the testing and development needs of the project, a custom low cost hardware-in-loop system can be designed with known limitations to save cost of the hardware-in-loop setup. The proposed HIL setup is signal level and can be used to perform on-bench signal level testing and fine tuning of any software. The paper covers the hardware-in-loop of 3-phase PMSM motor control for SW testing as an example. This paper may help developers and testers from automotive industries to find a low cost solution for their project needs. Any continuous time modeled system in MATLAB can be converted to a deployable discrete time model. With the help of MATLAB HDL workflow advisor, discrete time model can be converted into a HDL code which can be deployed to an FPGA platform to run in real time.