EPECC: Embedded Power Electronic Converters and Control

To keep the industry competitive, very high quality products have to be manufactured at staggering rates. However, state-of-the-art electronic power converters, which are an essential component in modern equipment, canbe optimized exclusively for low distortion or high bandwidth, but not for both at the same time. This inherent trade-off will be the limiting factor in tomorrow’s high-tech equipment. The EPECC proposal aims to trade slow passives for fast active components in the power converter, which increases the power stage complexity, but allows for more flexibility. The additional degrees of freedom will be leveraged through advanced real-time control, to dramatically increase the efficiency, power density, accuracy, bandwidth and dynamic range of next generation power converters. A set of tools will be developed to embed the design flows for the power stage and the associated control system into a single automated, well-structured, and verifiable process.