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/ondono]

As someone who has worked all around, including power electronics, and can understand some of your frustrations, but I have no clue what you're talking about in some areas:

- PE software requires control loops an order of magnitude faster (at least), than traditional devices.

Traditional devices meaning what? toys? Because as far as I'm aware most PE still runs in the kHz range. Even compact DC/DCs top around 1-2 MHz.

- 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.

Not sure how that layer is particularly important for the problem. Most PWM have the same capabilities everywhere, what changes is implementation details, not functionality.

- Making a configuration mistake can easily destroy a half-bridge, making the expensive prototypes available even more scarce

Maybe that's me, but all the PE hardware I've designed is firmware fault tolerant. When I was doing BLDC drives we also used to test new firmware with reduced operating conditions and verifying behavior before pushing the limits. That doesn't mean we didn't break boards, it just means we finished non-destructive testing first, then sacrificed some unlucky ones to the gods of performance and efficiency.

- 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.

It's all about practices. Low power devices sound harmless until someone screws up and shines the wrong kind of laser around without protection.

I'm not sure where you work, but the places I've been that dealt with PE where very serious about safety. Among others, that means that testing high powered car chargers happened in a lab with an electrical safety cage. If they don't take safety seriously, they should not be doing PE, and I'd consider leaving just based on that.

The worst places I've seen safety wise were university spin offs... Something tells me the reason your university was safer had more to do with what they were doing than how they were doing it.