New Industry Products

Strategic Collaboration to Accelerate Power Electronics Design

February 13, 2017 by SEMIKRON

Semikron announced a technology collaboration with National Instruments (NI)to help lower the cost and risks of developing power conversion products

Semikron announced a technology collaboration with National Instruments (NI), a leading provider of deployable Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based embedded control platforms. The strategic collaboration is intended to help lower the cost and risks of developing power conversion products such as renewable energy inverters, energy storage systems and specialized variable frequency drives at power levels over 50 kilowatts.

 “We are very happy to announce this collaboration to help enable our shared customers to speed up their time to market substantially”, says Mr. Timo Gassauer, Marketing Manager at SEMIKRON. “The complexity of power electronic systems and control is increasing dramatically and we have observed how design teams greatly benefit from building on proven and deployable platforms.” Mr. Gassauer explains: “We are working with NI to help improve the productivity of power electronic system designers by providing them with reference designs, pre-validated interfaces and pre-built software templates. This way, our customers can begin developing their application software right away!”

The collaboration brings together the reliable SEMIKUBE, SEMISTACK and SKiiPSTACK families with the proven, tried and tested NI General Purpose Inverter Controller (GPIC) deployment hardware and the LabVIEW FPGA Module from NI. SEMIKRON’s power electronic stacks are assembled in five stack centers located on four different continents, providing global manufacturing capability with short lead-times.

Unlike traditional DSP-based control systems, the NI GPIC powered by Xilinx Zynq-7020 with embedded FPGA contains hundreds of embedded DSP cores, that deliver up to 70 times higher performance per dollar. LabVIEW FPGA enables control design engineers to implement the most advanced control capabilities using intuitive and familiar graphical programming. The NI tool chain includes an extensive library of power electronics floating point control algorithms for many different converter topologies from 50 kW to 5 MW.

 

About SEMIKRON

SEMIKRON is one of the world's leading manufacturers of power modules and systems primarily in the medium output range (approx. 2 kW up to 10 MW). Our products are at the heart of modern energy efficient motor drives and industrial automation systems. Further application areas include power supplies, renewable energies (wind and solar power) and electric vehicles (private cars, vans, buses, lorries, forklift trucks, and more). SEMIKRON's innovative power electronic products enable our customers to develop smaller, more energy efficient power electronic systems. These systems in turn reduce the global energy demand.