Microchip Tech Announces Expansion Of Motor Control Digital Signal Controllers

Microchip Technology Inc. announced 10 new 28- and 44-pin 16-bit Digital Signal Controllers (DSCs), said to be for motor control designs requiring increased memory or performance, or enhanced peripherals, while obtaining cost and size savings associated with lower pin-count devices. Microchip also announced a new motor control development platform based on the popular Explorer 16 development board.

The 10 dsPIC33 Motor Control Family devices announced today bring Microchip’s total count of DSCs with on-chip, 3-phase motor control PWMs to 36 devices – said to be the largest motor control DSC portfolio in the industry. The newly announced devices are offered in 28- and 44-pin configurations, and come in packages as small as 6 x 6mm. They offer up to 128 Kbytes of programmable Flash memory to accommodate large proprietary algorithms, such as observer motor control models, integration of motor control algorithms with system-level control, communication stacks such as CAN, and graphic libraries for displays.

Two of the motor control devices contain Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs) which may be useful for motor noise reduction strategies or audio messages. A user-selectable 10- or 12-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) is available on chip. The 10-bit ADC mode features up to four Sample & Holds that can be triggered simultaneously, which is especially useful for sensorless control strategies to gain improved loop performance from synchronized sampling strategies.

All of the new motor control DSCs feature two quadrature encoder interfaces for applications with rotor position sensors. Additionally, they all have a flexible three-phase PWM controller, plus two additional PWM outputs on a separate time base for PFC, since PFC requires a loop that is typically over 30 times faster than that required for motor control.

The 10 new motor control DSCs range from $2.85 to $4.18 each in 10,000-unit quantities. These DSCs are sampling now and are expected to be available for volume production in 2CQ08.