FPGA Based PWM Generator for Three-phase Multilevel Inverter

This paper deals with the implementation on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) of PWM switching patterns for a voltage multilevel inverter. The reference data in main microcontroller is transmitted to the FPGA through 16 general purpose I/O ports. Herein, three-phase reference voltage signals are addressed by the last 2-bit (bit 15-14) and their data are assigned in remaining 14-bit, respectively. The carrier signals are created by 16-bit counter in up-down counting mode inside FPGA according to desirable topology. Each reference signal is compared with all carrier signals to generate corresponding PWM switching patterns for control of the multilevel inverter. Useful advantages of this scheme are easy implementation, simple software control and flexibility in adaptation to produce many PWM signals. Some simulations and experiments are carried out to validate the proposed method.