Industrial design and motor control using SoC FPGAs
There are several factors to consider when selecting a device in an industrial system, including: performance, cost of engineering changes, time to market, personnel skills, the possibility of reusing existing IP/libraries, the cost of field upgrades, and low power consumption. low cost.
Recent developments in the industrial market have driven the need for highly integrated, high performance, low power FPGA devices. Designers prefer network communications rather than peer-to-peer communications, which means additional controllers may be required for communication, which indirectly increases BOM cost, board size, and associated NRE (one-time engineering cost) costs.
Total cost of ownership is used to analyze and estimate the life cycle cost of the acquisition. It is an extended set of all design-related direct and indirect costs, including engineering cost, installation and maintenance costs, bill of materials (BOM) costs, and NRE (R&D) Cost, etc. By considering system-level factors, it is possible to minimize total cost of ownership, resulting in sustainable long-term profitability.
Microsemi offers SmartFusion2 SoCFPGA devices with hard-core ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers and IP integration in a cost-optimized package with features that reduce BOM and board size. With low power consumption and a wide temperature range, these devices operate reliably in extreme conditions without a cooling fan. The SmartFusion2 SoC FPGA architecture integrates a hard core ARMCortex-M3IP with the FPGA fabric for greater design flexibility and faster time to market. Microsemi offers an ecosystem of multiple multi-axis motor control reference designs and IP for motor control algorithm development, making it easier to move from multi-processor solutions to single-device solutions (ie SoCFPGAs).
Factors affecting TCO
The following are some of the factors that affect the system TCO.
(1) Long life cycle. FPGAs can be reprogrammed after deployment in the field, which extends the life cycle of the product, allowing designers to focus on new product development and achieve faster time to market.
(2) BOM. Micron's flash-based FPGAs do not require a startup PROM or flash MCU to load the FPGA at power-up, they are zero-level nonvolatile/instant-on devices. Unlike SRAM-based FPGA devices, Microsemi's flash-based FPGAs do not require an additional power-up monitor because flash switches do not change with voltage.
(3) Time to market. Intense competition among OEMs urgently requires more product differentiation and faster time to market. Proven IP modules dramatically reduce design time. It is now possible to provide multiple IP modules for building industrial solutions, while more modules are under development. Another unique advantage that SoC demonstrates is that it can be used to debug FPGA designs. To debug the FPGA design, the microcontroller subsystem can be used to extract information from the FPGA through a high-speed interface for debugging.
(4) Engineering tool costs. Contrary to the expensive concept of FPGA development tools, Microsemi offers a free LiberoSoCIDE for FPGA development that only pays when developing high-end devices.
Industrial drive system
The industrial drive system consists of a motor control device that contains the logic and protection logic that drives the inverter, and a communication device that enables the supervisory control to initialize and modify the runtime parameters.
In a typical drive system (Figure 1), multiple controller devices may be used to implement the drive logic. One device may perform calculations related to motor control algorithms, the second device may run communication-related tasks, and the third device may perform safety-related tasks.
