A multiprocessor for power electronic circuit simulation

Power electronic circuit simulation demands substantial improvements in the performance-to-cost of digital processing. Multiprocessors offer one possible method of reducing costs through the application of VLSI technology while increasing performance by exploiting concurrent computation. Multiprocessors suffer from overhead due to process interaction and resource access contention. A loosely coupled multiprocessor architecture is combined with a successive approximation linear equation solution algorithm to minimize process and processor interaction and overhead for high efficiency. A major obstacle occurs in the distribution of the subprocesses among the processors as a consequence of the changing topologies characteristic of power electronic circuits. The problem is resolved by localizing the effects of changing switches to specific subsets of the unreduced Kirchoff equilibrium equations and element v-i constraints through the adoption of a "companion" resistor by eacli switch.