Demonstration of Efficient Aerospace Power Controller Prototyping on the DLR Core Avionic Testbed

Abstract

The design of mission specific aerospace power controllers is constrained by cost and development time, often leading to poorly adapted and less then optimal heritage solutions. We want to provide modularity on circuit level to be able to deliver truly bespoke units. This is only possible if manual labor in the development process is reduced by design automation and tailored processes. Our approach is applied to the whole development effort from architectural exploration to detailed design. In this paper we focus on the prototyping stage that aims at delivering a correct-by-design functional model of the product under time and budgetary constraints. We demonstrate the application of our Avionics Design AutoMAtioN Toolkit (ADAMANT) for aerospace power controller design. A functional model of the controller is then implemented using our Modular Breadboard prototyping system. The prototype is demonstrated on the DLR Core Avionics Testbed (CAT), a platform to perform subsystem component tests in a mission like electrical environment. The state of the overall process and toolset development, lessons learned from this first application and future activities are presented.