Learning With Your PETS

Recently, we published an article [1] presenting how the Power Electronics course at the bachelor level is organized by the Power Electronics Laboratory and taught at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL, Switzerland. For those avid readers who may have checked the article, it may be clear that the main topic of that course aims to teach students practical hardware design. But, this is only a subset of the power electronics field, and there is much more to it. Namely, modern power electronics rely heavily on the digital control and use of computational resources such as microcontroller units (MCUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), or field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to name a few. As power ratings and complexity of the converters are increased, one must resort to using embedded controller hardware, and develop and deploy suitable control algorithms on it.