The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation technology based on the digital real-time simulator is increasingly widely used in recent years for rapid prototyping and testing of industrial electronic control units. In order to reduce the cost of the real-time simulator and improve its simulation performance

a real-time analog simulation technology based on electric analog switch and operational amplifier for power converter is presented. With the proposed simulation method

the electronic analog switch and the operational amplifier are respectively used to implement the switching function and mathematical operations in the mathematical model for the power converter. The analog simulation method is capable of achieving real-time computation for both switch signals and analog signals

and its simulation speed is independent of the size and complexity of the system model. Finally

a modular multilevel converter (MMC) is taken as an example to present the detailed implementation steps and circuits of the proposed simulation method

and an analog simulation test bench for MMC is designed and developed. Simulation and experimental results have verified the feasibility and validity of the proposed analog simulation method. This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51177095

No. 51277115).