New-Tech Europe Magazine | July 2019 | Digital Edition

and reduced BOM cost. These three advantages are especially important in certain application areas, such as consumer electronics. In connected IoT/IIoT-related applications, since they are small and often mobile, energy efficiency and noise control are at least as important as cost, and can be major design challenges: Energy efficiency: low voltage, (sensorless) field-oriented control, offloaded processor Noise cancellation: microstepping, current control, and voltage control for smooth, precise, and ultimately silent motion. There are several overall considerations when making the decision of whether to implement embedded motion control. Design engineers should ask themselves: What's my sweet spot in terms of cost? Am I an expert in motion control or not? Can I/do I want to do it on my own? How much time for developing my application can I eliminate? Trinamic has addressed several of these themes in two white papers: "How motion control defines system design -- The engineering view" and "Build vs Buy: Why Developing Your Motor Driver with Smart Microsystems May Be Your Best Option." While all of these are key questions, time-to-market is an ever-increasing factor and development times are shrinking rapidly. In fact, engineers at Trinamic are affected by this, too, during our own internal design process. For example, several new customers for custom projects have said they need to get a board working in only two weeks. So it's important to keep in mind that, while some engineers might want to design everything themselves, that may take too long for today's reduced product development cycles.

Figure 3: Top-level block diagram of the TMC8670 shows the different blocks that are all combined in one single motor driver chip, such as communication and FOC in hardware.

Conclusion: Examples of Embedded Motion Control The design of motion control is no longer difficult or complicated: instead, it has become a set of mainstream functions, or building blocks, which can help designers reduce their development overhead. We can now embed functions and sub-blocks physically (motor, sensors, housing, physical interface) and logically (algorithms, communication stacks, dedicated hardware accelerators), combined according to an engineer's specific application needs. Examples of increasing integration and miniaturization can be found in Trinamic's smart stepper controller + driver IC family, such as the TMC5130 / TMC5160 integrated motor driver and motion controller IC. The TMC5072 can even drive twomotors directly out of the IC. The TMC8670 dedicated EtherCAT motion controller IC is an example of the highest levels of integration. It's an SoC with a field-programmable gate

array (FPGA) and a real MCU inside, and includes EtherCAT real-time bus interfaces, protocol stacks, plus servo motor control in a single device. Another example of integration and miniaturization is Trinamic's TMC4671, a fully integrated servo controller with integrated analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), position sensor interfaces, and position sensor interpolators, and the PANdrive products, which are complete drive systems, including motor, ready to be used out of the box. If you think about all of these trends like AI, IoT, and IIoT, it becomes clear that they are typically located more on the processing and communication side. Nevertheless, many systems need a bridge to the real world. When people think about the IoT, they think sensors and data (the cloud). However, it's the actuators that give meaning to the IoT and make life comfortable by enabling the physical cloud, which consists of all the physical devices connected to the Internet. Embedded motion control is this bridge that connects the digital to the physical.

Figure 4: Top-level block diagram of a PANdrive™ smart motor solution by Trinamic.

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