FPGAs for Motor Control

Industrial, automotive, medical, avionics and defense segments use drives and motor/motion control systems in a wide variety of application areas, accounting for nearly 45% of the world's energy consumption. Examples of motor/motion control include factory and process automation, assembly/packaging, elevator control, robotics, EV/HEV powertrains, flight control systems and more.

Our SmartFusion^® 2 and IGLOO^® 2 FPGAs offer a flexible motor control IP suite and reference designs to tackle the increasing performance required to monitor and drive more efficient power electronics used in multi-axis motor control and high-RPM motor control applications. The performance of FPGA-based implementation is deterministic and bounded. The synchronous nature of these implementations add additional assurance that the timing is clock frequency-based and does not vary. Moreover, when Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) is adopted for multi-axis controllers, there is fairness as each motor has the same time slot length to make the system deterministic. 

Present-day motor control applications demand multi-axis, multi-function solutions.

Robotic arms in an automated industrial manufacturing unit or assisted medical surgeries require high-precision control in all directions with deterministic outputs. High-end industrial drones, stable gyros and mechanical reliability require high-speed calculations and flexibilities from a DSP. In more critical medical scenarios such as ventricular assist devices, robustness and reliability are non-negotiable factors of design.

Electric motors also perform vital functions such as attitude control, deployment mechanisms, motion and throttle valve control in space vehicles. Wing actuators maintain fuel efficiency in airplanes at lower speeds, typically after takeoff or when preparing to land. These applications necessitate long operating life, high reliability and security under high-vacuum, radiation and wide operating temperature environments.