Microcontroller Peripherals for Electric Drives

Abstract

At present, the electric machines are normally driven and controlled by a microcontroller or DSPs through smart and sophisticate electric drive. They have standard peripherals for its implementation such as I/O, timers, A/D converters, etc. However, several microcontroller and DSPs manufactures combine specific features and functions for high-performance machine control such as smart high-resolution pulse width modulation (PWM) timers and Delta-Sigma A/D converters. The high-resolution PWM signals help to generate smoother sinusoidal waveforms with high-frequency fine-tuning while Delta-Sigma A/D converters allow measuring accurately the machine phase current. The microcontroller/DSP peripherals, as well as the CPU performance, are determinant for the microcontroller/DPS selection, but it should be in agreement with the application. The GTM from Bosch is an example of smart high-resolution timer which can be found as an intellectual property (IP) integrated into different microcontrollers manufacturers. In this chapter, A/D converters and specifics peripherals for high-performance machine control are covered with simulations and real implementation examples for the AURIX™ family of Infineon and RX600 family of Renesas.