32-bit motor control microcontrollers (MCUs) from Renesas Electronics have dedicated hardware accelerator IP to perform the complex, high-speed computations required for motor control in robots and other industrial equipment.
The RX72T series achieves an 1160 CoreMark score as measured by EEMBC benchmarks, claimed to be the highest level for a 5.0V MCU operating at 200MHz.
The RX72T extends the migration path across the RX family for low-cost designs in compact industrial robots, explains Renesas.
Typical applications are servo systems. The rising demand for compact industrial robots is a target application, where high-precision control of the position, direction, speed, and torque of the motor is required to implement complex motions.
The RX72T MCUs include dedicated accelerator hardware that enables the high-speed position control and speed control calculations required for implementing servo motor control in compact industrial robots. The current control loop calculation can be performed in less than 1.5 micro seconds. This presents a choice for users to independently develop servo systems where previously they only had the option of purchasing existing servo systems.
Implementing calculations in software can require excessive computing time. However, completely hardware-based calculations can adversely affect the flexibility to implement user control operations. The RX72T MCUs, Renesas implement only the single-precision floating point trigonometric function (sin, cos, arctan, hypot) and a register bank saves the function in hardware as dedicated IP. This retains flexibility while increasing the calculation speed, says Renesas. The save function increases the speed and precision of interrupt handling, improving the device computation performance, Renesas adds. The MCUs also include 200 MHz PWM inverter control timers with up to four channels of three-phase control, two channels of five-phase control or 10 channels of single-phase control.
Pairing Renesas’ Failure Detection e-AI Solutions for motors with the RX72T MCUs can improve productivity, says Renesas. Characteristic data (current and speed values) that indicate the motor state can be used directly to implement motor control and e-AI-based failure detection with a single MCU. The MCUs also feature hardware-based system failsafe functions and a hardware cryptography module that can be used to encrypt/decrypt communications data.
Renesas also provides the Renesas Motor Workbench 2.0 for real-time debugging and an RX72T CPU card that supports the 24 V motor control evaluation kit.
The MCUs will be available in mass production quantities beginning in Q4 2019.
