A system and method for operating an welding-based power source includes an welding-type power source includes a power conditioner configured to receive power from a power source and condition the power to have characteristics within a predefined set of thresholds and an inverter configured to receive the conditioned power from the power conditioner and convert the conditioned power to AC power. The welding-type power source also includes a rectifier configured to convert the AC power to DC welding-type power to drive a welding-type process and a processor segregated into at least two functional modules. The processor may be a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based processor. A first functional module is configured to control the power conditioner to condition the power to have characteristics within the predefined set of thresholds and a second functional module is configured to control the inverter to convert the conditioned power to AC power.