Qorvo PAC® Series Chips in High-Speed DC Motor Control
Qorvo is a well-known RF company. But did you know that Qorvo now also has a place in power solutions?
In April 2019, Qorovo announced the acquisition of Active-Semi, a supplier of programmable analog power solutions, which will become part of Qorvo's Infrastructure and Defense Products (IDP) division. It is understood that Active-Semi's analog and mixed-signal system-on-chip (SoC) product portfolio provides scalable core platforms for charging systems, power supply systems, and embedded digital control systems for industrial, commercial, and consumer applications. Its Power Application Controllers® (PAC®) and programmable analog ICs can greatly reduce solution size and cost, improve system reliability, and shorten system development time.
At the 13th Motor Drive and Control Technology Innovation Seminar held by BigBit Business Network in Shenzhen recently, Active-Semi's PAC technology sales Hu Yangyang gave a speech entitled "Application of PAC® Series Chips in High-Speed DC Motor Control", bringing everyone Qorvo's hard power in this area.
Active-Semi's PAC technology sales Hu Yangyang
Hu Yangyang said that in a common motor control system, a board generally includes components such as DC/DC, LDO and MCU. These independent components will not only make the area of the entire PCB too large, but also because of the large number of components used, the overall cost will be relatively high. Qorvo's PAC chip can perfectly solve this problem.
As shown in the figure below, Qorvo's PAC chip can achieve the functions of the components in the dotted box in the figure below with an integrated chip. This not only saves components and area, reduces BOM costs, but also greatly reduces the failure rate in the product production process.
From Hu Yangyang's introduction, we learned that the PAC architecture has several obvious characteristics:
1. High-performance "all-in-one" power manager
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Integrated switching power supply controller supporting up to 600V, which can be configured as Flyback, high-voltage Buck or SEPIC topology, (2) integrated multiple linear regulators for internal chip power supply;
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Ultra-low standby power consumption of 18uA;
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Flexible multi-level power and temperature monitoring.
2. Gate pre-driver for motor control
Integrated high-side and low-side gate drivers with up to 2A drive capability, flexibly configurable propagation delay and fault detection.
3. Proprietary Configurable Analog Front End
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Integrated high-performance 3-way differential PGA and 4-way single-ended PGA for voltage and current sampling.
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Dedicated phase comparator for Sensorless BLDC zero-crossing detection, simplifying external circuit and algorithm design.
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Up to 10 protection comparators can realize window current detection and protection, and are linked with the PWM pre-driver to quickly cut off the output in case of overcurrent fault.
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Some products support cycle-by-cycle current limiting, which can achieve functions such as current limiting or power limiting.
4. High integration can meet the requirements of small size, low cost and high performance of the driver
Integrate peripheral discrete devices required for motor control, such as DCDC, op amp, IGBT/MOSFET pre-driver, and minimize the number of external devices to optimize BOM cost.
Hu Yangyang further pointed out that from the product roadmap, Qorvo PAC chips support applications of 48V, 70V, 160V and 600V, which is the product with the highest voltage level support in the industry. In terms of internally integrated MCUs, there are 150Mhz Cortex M4F and 50Mhz Cortex-M0 to choose from.
In order to improve the development efficiency of developers, Qorvo not only provides hardware information and software SDK, but also provides efficient and reliable motor control firmware. Of course, because it uses the Arm core, Qorvo is also concerned about the IDE/Programmer that developers are familiar with. Customers can develop products based on IAR/Keil/Eclipse. In addition, third-party support including burning and algorithms is also an advantage of the Qorvo PAC chip ecosystem.
"Based on these high-quality PAC chips, we can provide solutions for multiple fields," Hu Yangyang said. Especially in typical products such as vacuum cleaners, dust mite removers and hair dryers that have high requirements for speed, efficiency and ultra-high performance, this is what PAC chips are good at, Hu Yangyang emphasized.
To this end, Qorvo has launched some reference solutions for developers to choose from.
As shown in the figure below, the test waveforms of these solutions perform very well, especially at the start-up time and maximum speed.
And the performance in constant power test data also delivered a high score.
According to Hu Yangyang, the PAC®-based drive solution has the following advantages:
1. High system integration, less material quantity and smaller PCB area;
2. The power consumption in PAC sleep mode is 18uA (the latest solution can reach 8uA), achieving lower standby power consumption of the system;
3. Complete system monitoring and protection;
4. Single resistor current reconstruction method achieves more optimized BOM cost and stable constant power control;
5. Observer algorithm specially designed for fan loads to achieve higher speed and fast start-up.
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