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Claimed to be the first 70W brushless DC (BLDC) motor driver to provide code-free, sensorless trapezoidal and field-oriented control (FOC), the MCF8316A and MCT8316A BLDC motor drivers enable engineers to spin a BLDC motor in less than 10 minutes, said Texas Instruments. This eliminates months of design time for the design of industrial systems, whether major or small home appliances and medical applications such as ventilators and continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines.

The motor drivers integrate three gate drivers and six high- and low-side MOSFETs with 50mOhm of on-state resistance (RDS(on)) each, to enable up to 70W of power with 8A of peak current for 12- and 24V systems. They also include a low-dropout regulator, power MOSFETs, DC/DC step-down regulator and current-sense amplifiers, eliminating as many as 18 discrete ICs to reduce board space by as much as 70 per cent, said Texas Instruments.

“The need for real-time motor control is more critical than ever, thanks to broad-reaching trends like power efficiency and automation, as well as increasing demand for quieter motors,” said Noman Akhtar, senior research analyst, Omdia. “A growing number of industrial systems are transitioning from AC induction to BLDC motors, which are more power-efficient but require complex hardware and optimised software designs to deliver high performance.”

The MCF8316A and MCT8316A BLDC motor drivers include commutation control algorithms that eliminate the need to develop, maintain and qualify motor control software, which can take months. The algorithms, and high level of integration, enable the motor drivers to manage critical functions such as motor fault detection, while implementing protection mechanisms to increase system reliability. They integrate sensorless technology to determine rotor position and eliminate the need for external Hall sensors.

The MCF8316A sensorless FOC motor driver extracts motor parameters, enabling designers to quickly tune a motor while delivering consistent system performance regardless of motor manufacturing variations. The MCT8316A sensorless trapezoidal control motor driver enables designers to tune a motor using only five hardware pins, simplifying systems by eliminating the need for a microcontroller interface.

Both motor drivers provide advanced real-time control capabilities to help engineers achieve industry-leading acoustic performance in applications such as air purifiers, refrigerators, washing machines and fans. The MCF8316A includes a patented, precise automatic dead-time compensation technique that compensates for current distortion to optimise motor acoustic performance. The MCT8316A includes variable trapezoidal control techniques to reduce motor noise.

The MCT8316A sensorless trapezoidal control motor driver can reach a maximum motor electric speed of 3.5kHz, which is faster than any other code-free, sensorless motor driver. This speeds system response in applications such as robotic vacuums that require fast and precise motor control.

According to Texas Instruments, the motor drivers are the first in the industry to provide a quick and controlled way to actively decelerate a motor, enabling engineers to stop a motor 50 per cent faster than traditional motor-control techniques. They can also stop a motor without indiscriminately pumping energy back into the rail, which protects the system from damage.

Pre-production versions of the MCF8316A and MCT8316A are available in a 40-pin, 5.0 x 7.0mm quad flat no-lead package.

http://www.ti.com

To meet the demands of increased data centre traffic driven by 5G, cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications, routers, switches and line cards need higher bandwidth, port density and up to 800Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connectivity, says Microchip. The company has introduced the PM6200 META-DX2L PHY to overcome the signal integrity challenges associated with the industry’s transition to the 112Gbits per second PAM4 serialiser/deserialiser (SerDes) connectivity sufficient to support the latest pluggable optics, system backplanes and packet processors. Claimed to be the industry’s most compact, 1.6Tbits per second, low-power PHY (physical layer) it reduces power per port by 35 per cent compared to its 56Gbit per second PAM4 predecessor, the META-DX1, which was the industry’s first Tbit-scale PHY, said Microchip.

Commenting on the industry’s transition to a 112Gbit per second PAM4 ecosystem for high-density switching, packet processing and optics, The Linley Group’s principal analyst for networking, Bob Wheeler, commented: “Microchip’s META-DX2L is optimised to address these demands by bridging line cards to switch fabrics and multi-rate optics for 100, 400 and 800GbE connectivity”.

The industrial temperature-grade PHY that offers versatile connectivity, allowing for design reuse across applications, for example from a retimer, gearbox or reverse gearbox to a hitless 2:1 multiplexer (mux). The configurable crosspoint and gearbox features make full use of a switch device’s I/O bandwidth to enable the flexible connections necessary for multi-rate cards that support a range of pluggable optics. The low-power PAM4 SerDes enables the PHY to support the next-generation infrastructure interface rate for cloud data centres, AI/ML compute clusters, 5G, and telecom service provider infrastructure, over long-reach direct attach copper (DAC) cables, backplanes, or connections to pluggable optics.

According to Microchip, the META-DX2L is offered in the industry’s smallest package size, with dimensions of 23 x 30mm.

Microchip provides a full set of design-in collateral, reference designs, and evaluation boards to support customers building systems with META-DX2L devices.

Initial META-DX2L devices are expected to sample during Q4 2021.

http://www.microchip.com