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. The real-time simulation is performed on one of the cores while the other runs an embedded Linux for communication and ancillary services. The FPGA fabric is used to control the ADCs and DACs of the analog channels and to perform PWM generation and capture on the digital channels.

For small power electronic circuits such as DC/DC converters, simulation time steps of down to 1 µs can be achieved. Typical 3-phase inverter applications require time steps between 2 and 10 µs. If you are looking for a more powerful simulator supporting multi-core processing, 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.