RT Box 1

A HIL Simulator on Every Engineer's Desk

The RT Box 1 is ideally suited for HIL simulations of power electronic circuits of moderate complexity and for single-tasking control prototyping.

Processor

Inside the RT Box 1 operates a Xilinx Zynq Z-7030 system-on-chip that embeds two CPU cores on an FPGA. One FPGA-based Nanostep® solver unit is included for high-resolution simulation of specific power stages. The real-time simulation of all non-Nanostep power stage elements is performed on one of the cores while the other runs an embedded Linux for communication and ancillary services. The FPGA fabric is also used to control the ADCs and DACs of the analog channels and to perform PWM generation and capture on the digital channels.

For many common power electronic circuits including isolated DC/DC converters, simulation time steps 7.5 ns can be achieved using the single Nanostep solver. Additional circuitry, including sources, passives, meters, electric machines, controls, and other physical domain library blocks are simulated on the CPU typically with time steps between 2 and 10 µs. If you are looking for a more powerful simulator supporting multi-core processing and an additional Nanostep solver, you might want to consider the RT Box 2.

Scalability

For larger systems such as multi-level inverters, multiple units of RT Box 1, RT Box 2 or RT Box 3 can be connected together via high-speed serial communication links. The RT Box 1 has four such high-speed bi-directional links, each of them supporting a data rate of 6.25 Gbit/s. Connected RT Boxes can be operated with a synchronous simulation time step or asynchronously.

Technical Specifications

Technical specifications of all RT Boxes in comparison.