Digital Power Designer

An Add-on to Altair Embed

Digital Power Designer (DPD) is a comprehensive design tool for the design and development of digital power supplies and power conversion equipment.

Digital Power Designer has been designed by engineers working in the industry and tailored specifically to suit their needs for digital power supply design and power conversion equipment. Apart from the many varied control blocks for code generation and power conversion blocks for simulation, the code generation features and simulation of microcontroller peripherals are specifically based upon the complete TI C2000 range of microcontrollers, many of which are optimised for digital power and power conversion applications. High-level blocks are provided to get one up to speed very quickly, both with the Altair Embed design environment and with the digital design and programming of microcontrollers for digital power applications. The Digital Power Designer includes numerous ready-made control diagrams as a platform for starting new designs.

The automatic code generation features provide the ability for hardware and/or power engineers to achieve high-fidelity and practical software designs for digital power applications without the need to take on board additional software engineers. Production-ready and completed practical designs can be 100% achieved without the need of developing a single line of code.

 

“A key benefit to using Embed is its code generation capability and how quickly and fast it works. The speed of how its drivers work and being able to interface directly with our ROM code was really the most important benefit.”

Dave Wilson, Senior Motor Systems Engineer,

Texas Instruments

Features:

Digital Power Designer provides high-level blocks for simulation and code generation of power supply and digital power components and controls. Digital Power Designer blocks let you develop a working controller that can be directly downloaded to the microcontroller for digital power applications.The Digital Power Designer blocks efficiently model digital (or analogue) power supply configurations, along with control loops, to simulate and verify the control loop without the need for hardware. This allows you to develop your control routines much more flexibly, simulate, verify and make any needed corrections before sending out Gerbers to manufacture hardware. When your hardware arrives, you can use Digital Power Designer to compile and download the diagram to the microcontroller and test your real hardware.

  • Rapidly build simulation diagrams of power supplies and power conversion equipment and their controls.
  • Rapid development of complete digital control diagrams in the Embed environment.
  • Frequency response analysis and verification of power converters.
  • Generation of production-ready code for power converters directly from the Altair Embed/Digital Power Designer IDE.
  • Simulation of digital control algorithms in processor-in-loop configurations.
  • Design verification and debugging of digital designs using interactive target interface diagrams with hardware-in-loop configurations.
  • Ease of verification of control hardware and/or power hardware configurations using flexible and interactive hardware interface diagrams.
  • What if scenarios of digital power control algorithms.
  • Learning aid for digital power supplies.
  • Rapid and simplified experimentation of control scenarios to assist in the optimal selection of digital and analogue control techniques and configurations.

 

Digital Power Designer Contains

High-level and completely configurable blocks including:

  • Buck, boost and buck-boost converters.
  • Multi-phase buck, boost and buck-boost converters.
  • Sepic, Cuk and Zeta converters.
  • Push-pull, half-bridge and full-bridge converters.
  • Forward and flyback converters.
  • AC-DC converters.
  • DC-AC Inverters.
  • PFC converters.
  • Analog and digital Compensators.
  • Many power converter controller blocks including voltage mode controllers, peak and average current mode controllers, PFC and hysteretic controllers.
  • Configurable PWM generators and controllers.
  • Analog and digital filters.
  • Fully configurable sources and loads.
  • Set of simulation blocks emulating TI C2000 MCU peripherals including ePWM, ADC, DAC, eCAP, comparators and GPIO for digital control simulations.
  • Numerous code-generable blocks for digital control algorithm development.
  • Blocks for debugging routines directly on microcontrollers with processor-in-loop configurations.
  • Compensator design tools.
  • Tools for the conversion of analogue designs to digital designs.
  • Frequency response analysis. 


Application Areas

The application areas range from analogue and digital power supplies, power conversion equipment and DC/DC converters to electric vehicles, rectifiers and battery chargers, uninterruptible power supplies and more.

 

Benefits:

The tool-set offers a complete set of functions to ease the design of power converters in the digital domain, among these features to:

  • Leverage numerous functional simulation diagrams for complete simulation and verification of power converters within minutes.
  • Convert analog designs to digital designs.
  • Leverage a set of pre-built and verified code-generable blocks for use in microcontroller control algorithms for direct C code generation and downloading to microcontroller hardware.
  • Verify in simulation those control diagram specific details in the digital control domain using emulated microcontroller peripheral blocks.
  • Perform model-based frequency response analysis and AC sweeps.
  • Use debugging tools for TI C2000 microcontrollers.
  • Easily create diagrams for the interactive verification of algorithms directly on control hardware.
  • Get inspired by hundreds of worked examples demonstrating converter performance and for rapid development of power conversion systems including simulation, code generation and interactive Hardware-in-Loop diagrams.

 

Legal | © Copyright 2018 Altair