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Complex System
Integration
Because CogniSim commands switches intelligently it provides
superior control for both a wide range of motor control and power
control/power management applications as a single controller.
However, in addition, since CogniSim is founded on common switch
mode, simulation and control principles, it offers a unique opportunity
for the simplification, commonality, and scalability of the design,
management, and operation of complex systems. This will be particularly
relevant for the complex systems required for many of the emerging
alternative energy applications.
Traditionally, motor drives, power supplies, grid connect systems
etc. are developed and designed in isolation of each other. The system
integrator then invests considerable time and effort assembling these
subsystems, understanding and verifying system issues.
When the time comes to go to market, the need to change the design
for commercialization reasons results in significant risk because any changes
require redesign, rework, re-simulation and verification.
Very quickly it becomes clear that the development investment
expended in
simulating, designing, and prototyping is lost when it comes to
commercialize a new system.
CogniSim in the long view, offers a clear plan early at its
very core concept because it assists engineers in automating the
simulation, verification and optimization process of new derivative
designs as they migrate from the lab to production.
Because CogniSim is based on a common, universal implementation
concept, the ability to split, and recombine apparently different
technologies in power is more easily managed.
This aspect ensures and promotes reusability. Since key aspects of
the DSP control hardware and each power circuit is represented and
carried with each and every CogniSim controller the task of
integration , and management of inter-component interaction is more
easily achieved.
CogniSim's inherent embedded simulation capability will ultimately
allow these complex systems to be conceived, simulated and verified
offline with virtual certainty that they will function together in the
complex system as planned.
The management of power technology is not just the technology, but
the ability to sustain, reuse and promote future evolutions of hardware
when they become available, without destroying the vested years of
design that has gone before.
In this view, CogniSim has a unique role in the future of Power
Control and Management.
It is clear that in the past, with traditional
controllers each system above would require separately conceived,
designed, simulated and tested power electronic control systems. However, the overhead of managing these
independent products, and then integrating them will always be large,
and prone to risk until a fundamental common foundation is determined to
allow the entire power electronic system design approach to be more
effectively managed.
CogniSim offers the needed commonality, and structured,
strategic approach to the long term challenges of integrating the most
complex systems, and in the short term, CogniSim also offers significant
performance advantages in any single sub-system as well, for
example lower switching frequency and high performance, to name a few.
In time, as DSP processors continue to increase in computational
speed and power, the ability for CogniSim to "look at the big picture"
in any system, will allow further simplification to be achieved as shown
below.
Today, different power electronic systems when integrated require
complex and costly network interfaces, with high speed data flowing
between subsystems. In the future, miniaturization and integration
initiatives of CogniSim itself into FPGA or ASIC format will result in
removal of these communication requirements, so that all memory, and
processing can be done within a single CogniSim brain. In this scenario,
just a few physical switch commands, and key current and voltage
variables will be the only physical elements requiring
measurement and actuation hardware.
All of this is consistent with the general goals of making the
emerging market power industry viable, affordable, reliable and
accessible to the mass world market.
Best of all, the CogniSim common foundation will allow all
previous CogniSim systems developed and tested, to retain their
value as viable blocks of IP that can be reused in any future CogniSim
embodiments as shown above. In this way Zetacon's licensing customers
are assured that they will also benefit from the CogniSim evolution, and
their IP will have access to the new opportunities CogniSim will
produce.
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