A hardware/software co-simulation framework for power converter firmware development

This paper presents a hardware/software co-simulation framework for power converter embedded software design. The methodology models all important power converter electronic circuitry in fine detail, and then uses the actual firmware source code of the physical digital signal processor to create a near-to-real simulation framework. Averaged model representations of the converter's switching processes are then integrated into the system to minimise the simulation run time for extended time domain simulation runs. The approach is currently being used for the firmware development of a commercial single-phase grid-connected solar inverter. Matching simulation and experimental results are included to verify the effectiveness of the approach.