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Most of automotive applications rely on Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (PMSMs) thanks to the afforded high efficiency and reduced cost and size. However, this trend is subject to severe safety requirements, particulary related to the reliability of the mechanical position sensor. In this context, the present paper deals with PMSM sensorless control, aimed at providing the position information redundancy. Yet, some side effects, as saturation and cross-coupling, may compromise the estimation quality. To achieve a deeper insight into the impact of these phenomena, authors highlight the way that sensorless estimation accuracy is predicted from the rotor geometry anisotropy. The objective is two-fold: 1) Provide a detailed approach for the characterization of the PMSM magnetic model under different load conditions, 2) Deduce the machine saliency behaviour and the induced estimation error due to saturation effects. To do so, an accurate flux linkage model is required. This model should allow to evaluate the arising cross-saturation terms. Experimental results are presented, referring to two test traction motors dedicated to the electric vehicle application.

New System-on-Chip (SoC) devices, which include powerful general purpose processors and FPGA in the same chip are particularly suitable for Real-Time (RT) simulation of electromechanical systems. This paper introduces a systematic analysis of the capabilities of one of these devices for RT electromagnetic simulation. Considering all the capabilities of these platforms, it is not straightforward to use them efficiently and port existing developments due to the SoC relative complexity and variety of programming models. In this paper, authors evaluate some of the benefits of moving to such platforms through the implementation of an example application on the Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC. Simulation results concerning execution time, resources usage and precision of the calculations are presented, compared and validated using MATLAB/Simulink.