Know-how developments in motor drive designs have opened many doorways. For instance, in movement management programs, larger precision, effectivity, and management offers many advantages in consumer expertise and security, sources optimization, and environmental friendliness. The introduction of brushless motor expertise was a significant step towards total larger effectivity.
The transition from brushed to brushless began a while in the past and continues to evolve as extra new applied sciences and system parts are launched. On the similar time, nonetheless, new developments in electrical parts allow higher thermal administration, larger energy density and miniaturization whereas permitting the execution of extra complicated duties at a aggressive value.
Utilizing best-in-class semiconductor expertise, electrical motor designs for low- and medium-voltage lessons could be extra environment friendly, smaller, and supply larger performance to finish customers. Right here, engineers can select from various semiconductor options to fine-tune their motor drive designs.
The technical parameters, akin to switching frequency and thermal resistance of finish merchandise, set the necessities for drives. Subsequent, to construct a well-optimized system that ideally improves energy density and reduces measurement, designers have to reduce losses—each conduction and switching losses—and optimize thermal administration.
This text highlights three design venues for creating extra compact, environment friendly, and higher-performing motor drives.
- Enhancements in energy package deal expertise
Following the pattern of accelerating battery voltages in robots and energy instruments, the facility of the motor drive can be growing. This interprets into growing necessities for energy semiconductors when it comes to excessive present score, ruggedness, and prolonged lifetime. A profound venue to sort out these wants is new packaging expertise platforms, which is available in three completely different variations, relying on particular wants (Determine 1).
Determine 1 Here’s a broad comparability of TOLL, TOLG, and TOLT packaging applied sciences. Supply: Infineon
- TO-leadless (TOLL) is optimized to deal with currents of as much as 300 Some time growing energy density with a considerable discount in footprint. A footprint discount of 30% in comparison with D2PAK, along with a peak discount of fifty%, leads to an total area saving of 60%, enabling rather more compact designs.
- TO-leaded with gullwing (TOLG) package deal provides a appropriate footprint to the TO-leadless package deal. The extra function of gullwing leads leads to 2x larger thermal biking on-board (TCoB) performances in comparison with TO-leadless. This package deal is superb in efficiency on aluminum insulated steel substrate (Al-IMS) boards.
- TOLT is the TO-leaded top-side cooling package deal inside the TOLx household. With top-side cooling, the drain is uncovered on the floor of the package deal, permitting for 95% of the warmth to be dissipated on to the heatsink, attaining 20% higher RthJA and 50% improved RthJC in comparison with the TOLL package deal.
- Three-phase gate drive controller ICs
The brand new 3-phase good motor driver ICs allow the event of high-performance motor drives utilizing brushless DC (BLDC) or everlasting magnet synchronous (PMS) motors. These designs are particularly suited to cellular robots, drones, and energy software functions.
Determine 2 A gate driver controller IC could be built-in with a microcontroller in a single package deal. Supply: Infineon
With over 50 programmable parameters utilizing a built-in digital SPI interface, a motor driver IC is extremely configurable to drive a broad vary of MOSFETs, thus yielding the very best system effectivity. Different advantages embody:
- Lowered exterior parts and PCB space
- Optimized effectivity and electromagnetic interference (EMI)
- Most flexibility to make use of completely different inverter FETs
- Extremely correct present sense whereas saving exterior parts
- Increased dynamic vary to extend sign decision
- Improved reliability and fault detection
- GaN for improved effectivity and energy density
In some circumstances, an vital design objective is the combination of energy electronics near the motor or inside the similar housing. Potential advantages embody elevated energy density, lowered bill-of-material (BoM) prices, as each motor and electronics could be positioned in a smaller housing, and value financial savings as a result of larger system effectivity.
Generally, warmth dissipation and bulk capacitance have been limiting components in built-in motor drives (IMDs). The transfer to gallium nitride (GaN)-based designs offers the muse to beat the difficult trade-off between switching pace and most output energy. Increased switching frequencies that may be carried out through the use of field-oriented management (FOC) allow quite a few system advantages, together with lowered bulk capacitance, decrease motor ripple present, decrease torque ripple, and fewer acoustic noise. The upper frequency additionally permits decrease motor temperature. The mix results in larger end-to-end system effectivity enhancements.
In drones, the system effectivity advantages not solely make the design extra environment friendly as a result of decrease losses but additionally smaller, which is a key profit to creating drones lighter and thus fly longer.
Transferring into the longer term
Increased product integration makes it less complicated for engineers to implement ready-to-go options to cut back the time to market. Combining excessive integration with broad programmability options, as in motor driver ICs, leads to aggressive benefits and system flexibility. Subsequent, new packaging and vast bandgap applied sciences present further movement management system benefits akin to:
- New package deal designs supply optimized thermal administration as switching losses are at all times accompanied by warmth within the energy switches.
- New vast bandgap gadgets set up the muse of upper switching frequency drives, serving to each accuracy and footprint.
To develop essentially the most aggressive movement management programs, designers should benefit from all the newest accessible applied sciences.
Nenad Belancic is international utility supervisor for Robots & Drones at Infineon Applied sciences.
Adam Gozdzicki is senior international utility supervisor for Cordless Energy Instruments at Infineon Applied sciences.
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