Novel Use of Graphical System Design Tools and SPICE to Exploring Efficiency in Power Simulation

A novel use case will be explored showing how modern graphical system design tools used together with SPICE in a co-simulation environment can be used to represent accurate simulations of practical real world digitally-controlled power inverters with a high level of accuracy while at the same time taking high level power measurements that would otherwise not be practical using separate design environments. This concept allows power design engineers to quickly explore various software and hardware methodologies while evaluating key performance metrics within the simulation. The benefit of using the graphical system design approach with SPICE is two-fold in that the control algorithms for the inverter design can be rapidly adjusted while key metrics of the design can be evaluated in an effort to optimize the design over a wide range of operating conditions. The graphical system design tool methodology of LabVIEW will be used in a collaborative fashion within a SPICE environment (Multisim) to explore the technique of extracting advance power metrics while performing circuit simulation. Using these techniques and co-simulation for implementing the digital control, the analog plant of an inverter scheme will be discussed to accurately evaluate loss, overall system efficiency and loss due to temperature effects and explore system behavior over various startup and load conditions. Simulation results for the digital inverter design with the presented methodology are given. To show the quality of the generated simulation data, simulation data is compared directly with data from a prototype implementation of the same design.