Implement your servo controller in a day with the TMC4671

The trend towards automating everything around us has increased the demand for energy efficient control even of the smallest motors, so the focus on reducing energy consumption has shifted from large motors also to the smaller, embedded applications, where the use of large inverters is no option.

The TMC4671 addresses this market by embedding all necessary control loops in rugged, reliable state-machines. By offloading real-time critical tasks from the processor and software and implementing all control functions in hardware, the TMC4671 offers a crucial benefit: it takes care of all control functions itself. Integrated ADCs, position sensor interfaces, and position interpolators enable a fully functional servo controller for a wide range of servo applications such as robotics, pick and place machines, factory automation, e-mobility, lab automation, and blowers.

“Application layer or bus protocol firmware needs to be updated over the typical lifetime of a product,” explains TRINAMICs founder and CEO Michael Randt. “Having all real-time tasks embodied in dedicated, proven and reliable hardware, minimizes the effort for the initial firmware development and these updates and thus reduces the total cost of ownership.”

The TMC4671 is designed to rapidly decrease time to market for highly performant servo controllers while maximizing drive efficiency as well as dynamics. With all time critical calculations in hardware, just a few lines of code are necessary to develop a dynamic servo controller.

It offers high switching frequency and controller update rates of up to 100kHz and has filtering and interpolation features like the digital Hall signal interpolation for smoother operation. The IC can work with various encoders such as simple digital or analog Hall sensors over A/B/Z incremental and high-resolution sin/cos analog encoders. Sensors can be flexibly mapped as an input for position and velocity control loops. With its delta sigma current sensing ADCs, the TMC4671 is perfectly suited for isolated delta sigma frontends.

The TMC4671 is available immediately in QFN76 package through distribution for USD 7.20 at 1000 units. Besides the IC, Trinamic will also offer the TMC4671-BOB and TMC4671-EVAL for Trinamic’s modular Landungsbrücke Evaluation System. Together with Trinamic’s powerful tools including TMCL-IDE, this speeds up development and design-in processes considerably.

Features and benefits:

–           Servo controller with field-oriented control

–           Torque control (FOC), velocity control, position control

–           Feed forward control inputs

–           Integrated ADCs, delta sigma-ADC frontend

–           Encoder engine: Hall analog/digital, encoder analog/digital

–           Supports 3-phase PMSM/BLDC, 2-phase stepper motors, and DC motors

–           Advanced PWM engine (25kHz… 100kHz)

–           Application SPI + debug (UART, SPI)

–           Step-direction interface (S/D)