Electric motors account for over half of all the power generated and consumed by industrialized countries and the majority of those motors are AC induction motors, which have an average efficiency of just 44%. In order to improve efficiency, motor drives designers need to better understand how these and other types of motors operate under all load conditions, and intelligently compensating for variable conditions.
In response, ON has developed the Motor Development Kit (MDK) which comprises of a growing number of Power Boards, connected to a Universal Controller Board (UCB). The Power Boards feature various incarnations of ON Semiconductor 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.
Intelligent motor control requires a flexible and programmable approach. 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 best possible 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 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 ON Semiconductor's best in class 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.
“ON Semiconductor already offers a broad portfolio of power solutions optimised for variable motor control,” said 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 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 ON Semiconductor's TMPIM technology, designed to drive motors up to 10 kW. Further power boards and expanded design support will be added to the MDK ecosystem over the coming months.
