Development of Universal Controller Architecture for SiC Based Power Electronic Building Blocks

The objective of this project was to develop a Universal Controller Architecture suitable for SiC based Power Electronic Building Block PEBB converters. Recent developments in SiC power devices are beginning to yield PEBBs with far greater switching frequencies than Si based devices resulting in anorder of magnitude reduction of the control time scales as compared to converter systems utilizing conventional IGBT based PEBBs. In addition there have also been advancements in highly modularized converter systems with hundreds of PEBBs, such as the Modular Multilevel Converters. Both of those trends present the need to evaluate architecture tradeoffs and communication requirements for hardware realizations of the Universal Controller Architecture for control of power electronic converters and systems of converters. The control network should be designed to have minimal round-trip latency and maximal scalability.