Motor control dev kit for applications from 1 kW to 10 kW
The Motor Development Kit (MDK) comprises one of a growing number of power boards, connected to a universal controller board (UCB). The power boards feature various incarnations of the company’s inverter solutions for motor drive – from high-voltage integrated modules to low-voltage, discrete MOSFETs.
The UCB is a common control platform that interfaces with any power board to enable engineers to evaluate alternative motor control techniques for various types of motors and at a wide variety of power levels.
“ON Semiconductor already offers a broad portfolio of power solutions optimized for variable motor control,” says Ali Husain, Sr. Manager, Corporate Strategy & Marketing at ON Semiconductor. “The Motor Development Kit brings these technologies together into a single ecosystem that can really help design teams accelerate the process of developing more efficient motor control solutions.”
The UCB is based on the Zynq-7000 SoC family from Xilinx, which integrates two ARM Cortex-A9 processor cores alongside an FPGA fabric, providing the optimum combination of software and hardware configuration. The board also features a 10-channel differential ADC, 12 PWM channels, and a number of configurable digital peripherals. Communication ports include USB, JTAG and UART, as well as a Gigabit Ethernet PHY.
The MDK, says the company, provides an ‘out of the box’ experience for evaluating variable speed motor inverter solutions. To enable this, the modular ecosystem includes the UCB and a number of power evaluation boards, developed using the company’s power components. Support for software development comes from Xilinx in the form of the Vivado Design Suite for High-Level Synthesis. The UCB can also be programmed using Python, through Xilinx’s open source project, PYNQ.
Chetan Khona, director, Industrial, Vision, Healthcare & Sciences at Xilinx says, “Optimizing energy efficiency in motors has an enormous impact on the carbon footprint of factories and industrial equipment across the planet. Technology from ON Semiconductor together with high-performance motor control in Xilinx Zynq SoCs reduces operational cost drastically, offers the most adaptability for user customization, and makes a positive contribution to the environment. The new Motor Development Kit from ON Semiconductor makes this accessible and facilitates migration from prototype to production.”
The MDK currently supports two motor power boards: the SECO-1KW-MCTRL-GEVB, which is suitable for driving motors up to 1 kW, and the SECO-MDK-4KW-65SMP31-GEVB, for driving motors up to 4 kW. Both of these power boards use ON Semiconductor’s IPM technology and will be available in Q4, 2020.
An additional motor power board will be released in Q1, 2021 based on the company’s TMPIM technology, designed to drive motors up to 10 kW. The company says to expect further power boards and expanded design support to be added to the MDK ecosystem.
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