Synopsys Releases Virtual Prototyping Solution for Power Electronics
Silicon to Software company Synopsys has released a new virtual prototyping solution designed to accelerate the development of power electronics systems.
Dubbed SaberEXP, the solution is a piecewise linear (PWL) circuit simulator that enables design teams to start development and validate designs before physical implementation.
SaberEXP user interface. Image used courtesy of Synopsys.
SaberEXP designs can also be imported into SaberRD, Synopsys’ flagship integrated environment for power electronic systems, and multi-domain physical systems.
The SaberEXP Prototype
The SaberEXP platform offers high abstraction models and a piecewise linear (PWL) solver with an event queue for event-driven and digital signals. This enables the solution to provide high accuracy and convergence for power converters and motor drives.
Part of Synopsys virtual prototyping products, which include Silver, SaberRD, and Virtualizer, the SaberEXP solution enables both hardware and software design, development, and verification.
The system is capable of computing fast results for stiff power electronic circuits in both time and frequency domains without integration error. The SaberEXP prototype provides Periodic AC analysis to verify the stability of Switched Mode Power Supplies (SMPS) and eliminate the need for average model derivations.
It also offers parametric and statistical design capabilities for optimizing and verifying system robustness, as well as a suite of measurement and waveform calculation tools for analyzing results.
Synopsys has already used SaberEXP to explore various innovative designs for power electronics.
One of them is a high-speed mixed-mode solver, which combines an event queue for event-driven and digital signals with a fast analog PWL solver. Other examples include PWL analog models with discrete regions of linear operators in a variety of domains and simulation of complex multi-physics behaviors in time and frequency domains.
SabeEXP, together with Synopsys other virtual prototyping products, is designed for use with Windows 10 machines.
Designed for Power Electronics Systems
The new prototype was developed to answer the increasing need for power electronics in a variety of industries.
"Automotive, aerospace and industrial embedded systems integrate increasingly complex and feature-rich power electronics, digital hardware and software," said Tom De Schutter, vice president of Engineering at Synopsys, commenting on the news.
An increase in the complexity of applications also coincides with the need for faster deployment of these solutions.
"The introduction of SaberEXP enables our customers to deploy a faster, more productive, and standardized solution for power electronics from concept to validation and leverage its integration with our broader virtual prototyping products for embedded system verification and validation," De Schutter explained.
Since SaberEXP designs can be also imported into the SaberRD program, a high-fidelity simulation is possible, together with the handling of large systems, thanks to the platform’s robust design features.
From the left: piecewise linear diode model, saturating inductor model, IGBT model and MOSFET model. Image used courtesy of Synopsys.
In fact, Exporting SaberEXP designs into the SaberRD environment is performed via
automatic model mapping, and allows users to further evolve their designs by adding more device-specific details.
The SaberEXP prototype was therefore designed to minimize the cost of expensive physical hardware testing, save project resources, and accelerate time-to-market.
The solution is already available on Synopsys’ website and you can find it at this link here, together with a product datasheet and whitepaper.
