Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Today, the shortest time-to-market in the electric drives industries is being a pressing requirement, consequently development time of new algorithms and new control systems and debugging them must be minimized. This requirement can be satisfied only by using a well-defined System-level design methodology and by reducing the migration time between the algorithm development language and the hardware specification language.

In this report, we propose to use the SpecC language for the development (specification and validation) of new control algorithms. This includes the specification of the control systems (algorithms and I/O interfaces) in SpecC and its validation by simulation using a SpecC specification model of the process under control.

This new approach will allow designers to implement easily' the retained specification according to the SpecC methodology. Indeed, the same language (SpecC) is used for the study of new control systems and their design and implementation. We first begin with a brief presentation of the electric drives and of the SpecC language. Then, we discuss the specification models in SpecC of the whole system including the control unit and the process under control. We illustrate this approach by an application example of a DC system. Finally, we present the main advantages of the Spece language in the development of new control systems.