Infineon Technology focuses on the three major markets of electric motor drive to meet new challenges in the electric motor market
Time:2024-01-10
Views:383
Source: Electronics World
Based on the quarterly revenue comparison of Infineon in fiscal years 2021 and 2022, automation and drive, home appliances, and electric vehicles are the main market growth points for motor control system applications. These three pillars of motor drive can well reflect the development of global motor drive. According to analysts from market consulting firms and customer perceptions of the market, it is believed that the growth of electric motor drive will be relatively stable in 2023.
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Motor drive is an important application of power semiconductors, and Infineon‘s motor drive solutions cover various applications ranging from tens of watts to tens of megawatts. Power semiconductor products include IGBT, SiC MOSFET, high-performance AI processors, Wi Fi Bluetooth products for wireless interconnection in Industry 4.0, security chips, IPM intelligent power modules using IGBT, MOSFET, and SiC, high-voltage high current thyristors, and motor drive chip iMOTION ™ Etc; The application areas include general factory automation equipment such as small and large household appliances, universal frequency converters, servo drives, locomotive traction, electric vehicles, etc.
At the application level, Infineon‘s products cover a wide range of fields from home appliances to industrial and high-end frequency converters. Among them, the home appliance category has seen a rapid increase in efficient heating technology, heat pumps, and large-scale variable frequency appliances. In terms of the household appliance field, by 2024, the frequency of household air conditioners will reach 99%, and the frequency of washing machines and refrigerators will also increase year by year. By 2024, there will be 94% and 75% (a total of over 600 million units). From the perspective of the growth rate of the household appliance market and the growth of household appliance frequency, its potential is quite huge. Infineon also predicts a growth rate driven by industry in the market, with an increase of 4.8%.
Comparison of Infineon Motor Control Related Services
1 Digital control solution
Infineon can provide iMOTION digital control chip technology for motor control systems. It is a specialized motor drive chip that utilizes Infineon‘s long-term accumulation of system level knowledge. It can complete single resistance sampling, sensorless dual motor control, and PFC control on a single chip. Customers do not need to perform motor control programming, which is simple to develop and has a short research and development cycle. Mainly used for various motor drives mainly for variable frequency household appliances, with control objects including compressors, fans, water pumps, and general motors. IMOTION is a highly integrated product series for variable speed drives, utilizing DC bus current detection or bridge arm current detection, integrating all the control and analog interface functions required for sensorless field oriented control (FOC). Throughout the entire product line, the SmartIPM sub series achieves the highest level of integration. The MCE, microcontroller, gate driver, and three-phase inverter full bridge are all integrated into a pinless packaging component, forming a complete inverter system.
Infineon also provides microcontroller (MCU) products for motor control applications. The main advantages include the following points.
1) Infineon has a rich product line in MCU, including PSoC and XMC, which can comprehensively cover motor drive applications from home appliances to industrial control.
2) From an application perspective, Infineon supports motor drives for small household appliances, white goods, and industrial applications, as well as motor drives for special scenarios including healthcare, as well as motor drives for commercial vehicles, covering a very wide range.
3) From a solution perspective, Infineon has a mature solution team in China that can provide customers with a complete set of solutions to meet the requirements of motor drives for consumer appliances and industrial applications, including servo drives and frequency converters.
4) Infineon can directly provide customers with production level application software support, and can also place production level software on the evaluation board for evaluation, thereby helping customers further achieve better performance on their systems.
As the application scenarios of motor drives become increasingly widespread, their requirements for digital control will become higher. From the perspective of microcontrollers, the continuous improvement of computing power and peripheral performance of PSoC and XMC can drive the increase of frequency conversion at the software control end and system control end. This can drive the motor from the old generation fixed frequency drive to variable frequency drive, which helps to significantly improve the energy efficiency of motor drive at the system level. The use of microcontrollers in conjunction with Infineon‘s IGBT or silicon carbide power devices can achieve the highest system level efficiency at the hardware level. Infineon, based on its advanced technology and long-term accumulated development experience, can provide this cost-effective product. In addition, high-end motor drives need to support more specialized functions, such as supporting more industrial communication bus protocols and faster electric sampling systems.
For more complex motor drive systems, Infineon can provide customers with high-efficiency motor starting algorithms and FOC algorithms based on its own MCU products for reference. Then, customers can refer to Infineon‘s solutions to design and develop their own products. In addition, Infineon is also developing more efficient motor drive algorithms to match and support the upcoming next-generation MCU products with higher computing power, further improving the efficiency of the digital control part of the entire system.
2. Power units in a 2-motor system
Infineon has established a full range of IGBT7 products for motor drive applications in module packaging such as Easy and Econo. IGBT7 is an important product after the launch of IGBT4. It adopts micro groove technology, which has lower losses than IGBT4, and allows the working junction temperature to reach 175 ℃ when overloaded. This definition of the product meets the practical application needs. The high power density of IGBT7 significantly increases the power density of application systems. For example, Huichuan Technology uses IGBT7‘s servo drive SV660 1 kW, which reduces the volume by 39% compared to the previous generation product IS620 using IGBT4. TRENCHSTOP IGBT7 and EC7 diode technology is based on the latest micro groove technology, which greatly reduces device losses and has higher controllability. This chip has been optimized specifically for industrial motor drive applications and solar inverter applications, resulting in a significant reduction in device static losses, higher power density, and improved switching softness.
Silicon carbide can bring three advantages to motor drive. Firstly, it improves power density. Secondly, natural cooling can be used, which lays the foundation for the development of high-speed motor drive. The birth of SiC MOSFET technology has led to the development of high-speed power switching devices above 1200V. Silicon MOSFETs are mainly used in the field of medium and low voltage power of 650V and below. In addition to its high-speed switching characteristics, silicon carbide also has characteristics such as high thermal conductivity, high breakdown field strength, and high saturation electron drift rate, making it particularly suitable for applications with high requirements for harsh conditions such as high temperature, high power density, high voltage, high frequency, and radiation resistance. Power density is another important aspect of device technology value. The area of SiC MOSFET chips is much smaller than that of IGBTs, for example, the size of a 100 A1 200 V SiCMOS FET chip is about one-fifth of the sum of IGBTs and freewheeling diodes. Therefore, in the application of motor drive, the value of SiC MOSFET can be well reflected, including 650 V SiC MOSFET. 1200 V SiC MOSFET is a high-speed switching device that can greatly simplify the topology of some application circuits, improve system power density, and reduce costs.
At the same time, silicon carbide has also spurred the advancement of packaging technology, such as the Point XT technology applied to silicon carbide single tubes and the Easy series power modules using aluminum nitride DCB. Due to the high cost of silicon carbide chips, in order to improve their output capacity, heat dissipation becomes crucial. Therefore, it is necessary to use updated packaging technologies to achieve better heat dissipation, thereby improving the utilization rate of silicon carbide and making the power density of the system higher and more compact.
3 Other Trends
In the motor control system, sensors provide precise sensing for motor rotation and positioning, abnormal monitoring of motor vibration, and precise positioning information in the production line. The data collected by sensors can provide predictive maintenance functions, reducing or even avoiding the impact of abnormal components on the production line process. As for sensorless motors, Infineon will optimize algorithms in various aspects such as startup time, startup status in various application scenarios, detection and control, in order to improve control efficiency and make the operation of the entire system more stable. Infineon is developing the next generation MCU for edge computing and AI controller. First, under the trend of intelligence, this MCU product can use the characteristics of edge computing integration to optimize the support for applications requiring AI algorithm at the motor drive end. Secondly, from the perspective of sensing or data collection under the Industry 4.0 wave, Infineon has high-performance Bluetooth products, Wi Fi products, as well as Bluetooth and Wi Fi two in one products. These wireless connection products can be combined with sensors to form a data transmission system, which can intelligently transmit real-time data of the entire system through wireless connection, thereby improving the efficiency and energy efficiency of the entire motor system.
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