Performance evaluation of an FPGA controlled soft switched inverter

A field programmable gate array (FPGA) based controller is proposed for a dc link series resonant inverter. The basic operation of the zero current switching inverter is briefly described. A strategy of decoupling the control of the dc link current from the load current is identified and referred as decoupled current control (DCC). The use of gate-controlled devices like metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor/insulated gate bipolar transistor/MOS-controlled thyristor permits a higher resonance frequency at the link of the inverter. The increased frequency enables the application of pulse density modulation technique with a bang-bang controller to synthesise and control the wave-shapes of current and voltage of the inverter. The DCC strategy eliminates the conventional analogue controller. A digital sequence controller has been designed using the state machine technique for the reliable operation of the inverter. The digital design is implemented on a single chip FPGA. To verify the proposed control strategy and the FPGA controller, a prototype has been built and tested. The test results show that a sinusoidal inverter output voltage is maintained with total harmonic distortion less than 5% and a regulation of about 1% from no-load to full-load, including non-linear and transient loads. The performance of the inverter with the FPGA controller is promising and attractive for uninterrupted power supply applications.