The characteristics and resources of reconfigurable FPGA devices have been developed significantly in recent years. Thus, today they can be found in many application environments. In power converter applications, however, despite of the advances, the FPGAs are not yet widely used, and they are typically only used to perform secondary tasks.

Power converters are circuits that perform energy conversion in a controlled manner and, today, are used in many fields, for example, in motor drives, in electric vehicles, in elevators, in wind turbines, in energy storage systems, etc. These areas are very important in society, and it is necessary to develop and improve the characteristics of power converters. The matrix converter stands out among power converters, mainly, because it performs direct AC/AC conversion, it has no significant reactive elements (capacitors), it can operate in high and low pressure environments and at high temperatures, it presents bidirectional power flow, it is possible to achieve sinusoidal currents in the grid and sinusoidal voltages at the load and it is compact and modular. However, the MC still presents some challenges, for example, the control and modulation techniques of the MC are complex and have high computational load, it is necessary to work at high modulation and switching frequencies and the protection the MC is complex.

Regarding the development and improvement of power converters, the devices that are used to control these converters play an important role. Traditionally, DSPs (Digital Signal Processors) have been widely used to implement the control algorithms of the power converters and, in particular, of the MC. Meanwhile, FPGAs have been used only as auxiliary devices of the DSPs (typically to perform functions associated with commutation tasks), not making full use of their potential.

However, with today’s development of the FPGAs, they can be an appropriate solution that responds efficiently to the needs of the MC. In order to test the potential of new generation FPGAs and to demonstrate that they can be the control devices for the MC, in this thesis, the implementation of the control of the MC has been tackled from a different and innovative point of view using an FPGA instead of the conventional DSP aproach (there is no references that has been made previously). This system integrates control and modulation functions of the MC within a single circuit implemented by means of hardware blocks (using VHDL), as well as the protection functions, with the aim of increasing the robustness of the converter. In that way, it has been shown that FPGAs are able to implement the most demanding control functions of the MCs, and to respond to the speed requirements. Moreover, the FPGAs offer new opportunities to improve the characteristics of the MCs, for example, dynamic reconfiguration capability.

Modern power systems and their controls are becoming more complex, and the MC is a significant example. Therefore, the development of these systems is complex and long process. However, in order to reduce the time to market, it is necessary to shorten that process. To obtain that objective, simulation is an indispensable tool. However, the simulation of models containing the MC and its control is complex and requires of many resources and time. Therefore, tools to speed up those simulations and to simplify the debugging of control algorithms are needed. In that sense, there are some real time simulation modes: SIL (Software In the Loop), HIL (Hardware In the Loop) and RCP (Rapid Control Prototyping). With these modes, it is possible to speed up and simplify the development and debugging processes of the MC and, in general, of other power systems. To implement these simulation modes it is necessary to use powerful simulators. In this case, RT-Lab eMEGAsim simulator has been used, which is composed of a PC cluster and an FPGA. Using the RT-Lab, some real-time platforms have been implemented, which are valid to accelerate and simplify the design and validation process of the MC and its control. The model that simulates the power and control stages of the MC system in real time has been implemented. Thus, compared to traditional simulations, the executions of simulations are speeded up. A rapid prototyping platform for MC has been performed, in which the control and modulation algorithms of the MC have been tested, in real time and in real conditions (in a 7.5 kW MC prototype).

In the implementation of the real-time simulation platforms, the FPGA of the RT-Lab has performed some relevant tasks in the control of the MC. With the utilization of the FPGA has achieved, among other things, high resolution models of the MC and RL load, and the interaction with the real MC prototype.