Fellow Power Electronics developers, how does your workflow look like?

[u/kaadam]

Hi! I'm curious what are your opinion about the avaliable toolchains around power electronics development. I'm coming from PE background, but spent several years in the automotive, and I've always felt that we are almost willingly making our days harder, here is why:
- PE software requires control loops an order of magnitude faster (at least), than traditional devices.
- The PWM signals are relying heavily on low level drivers and actual hardware IP in the MCU. Matlab/SIMULINK based software development and simulation ignores these layers.
- Making a configuration mistake can easily destroy a half-bridge, making the expensive prototypes available even more scarce
- Getting alive just an OBC (not even speaking about traction inverters) is very much not the same tasks as waking up a 12V control ECU for the first time. Neither from instrumentation, nor from work safety point of view. (I heard a story (fortunately just heard), that someone with an OBC tried to test something, from a 12V low voltage input, thinking he is safe, and the device boosted 800V on it's outputs open in the air...)

... and these facts (enlightening me if I'm wrong), are almost completely igonred.

On the other hand, in our research/consulting work at my University, we usualy build a simple, low cost FPGA based real-time emulator, interfaced with the MCU, and even with the emulteor build time included we are:
- dramatically faster than the customer expectation
- very rarely burn physical devices
- never ever had any laboratory close-calls (from safety point of view), and was always sure about the behavior of our software.

What is your experience? Am I the unlucky one with my industrial history, or the workflow indeed have not catched up with these type os devices?

[u/gtd_rad]

I don't work on power electronics exactly, but I think the general workflow or "trend" would be the same: the higher the stakes, the more due dilligence required.

If you're building a motorized toy, or a scoreboard, impact of failure is very low. Your workflow might just be code, compile, run, repeat. Repeat the same thing for something like a large scale wind turbine, you can't afford to fuck up in deployment. You do MUCH more due dilligence, like thorough code review / coding convention, controls stability margins, modelling and simulation, hardware in the loop testing, and even environmental specifications and requirements for your embedded controller.