Trinamic Motion Control is unveiling its new family of motor drives with an embedded RISC-V core, dubbed ‘Rocinante’. Components in the new family combine Trinamic’s decades of experience in embedded motor and motion control together with the flexibility of the open RISC-V ISA microcontroller. The family is suitable to drive Stepper or BLDC motors, brushed DC-motors, and even voice-coil motors found in rapidly growing markets like service robots, home and office automation, light electric vehicles and power tools.
At the core of any embedded motor-controlling system is a microcontroller, running the application layer, providing a user interface or executing bus protocols. Trinamic has a long history as a leading provider of motor drivers and remains the only European manufacturer of dedicated motion control ICs. As a total solutions provider, Trinamic draws upon decades of experience providing embedded board-level microcontrollers. The single chip solution enables miniaturized and highly embedded standalone devices.
Actuators, motors and mechanical components typically have a much longer product lifetime than e.g. user interfaces or protocols, so the longevity of the components is crucial for device manufacturers. RISC-V is the perfect platform for long product lifetimes: the RISC-V ISA is stable and battle-tested, and there are no obligations or license agreements which could prohibit long-term road-mapping, development or technology transfer. Trinamic chose RISC-V as the foundation for the future of embedded motion control.
Trinamic is an early member of the RISCV group. The company has already successfully implemented RISC-V cores in an early stage on FPGAs, meeting the specific requirements of customers who were looking for a reliable and stable architecture for the long-term. Trinamic is committed to the idea of an open instruction set. The design uses self-developed IP in combination with carefully selected, thoroughly tested and strictly European-sourced IP blocks.
The debut members of the new component family will be a dedicated BLDC/PMSM driver with 6 integrated gate-drivers and a dedicated stepper motor and stepper servo driver with 8 integrated gate drivers. Both components share a rich set of integrated diagnostics and interfacing features. The whole family is equipped with a 32-bit RISC-V core, hardware-based field oriented control, serial interfaces, USB, CAN-FD and gate drivers for 2-phase or 3-phase motors. Integrated switching regulators allow for one-chip drive solutions. 128k EEPROM based non-volatile memory and 32k SRAM make it powerful enough to handle everything from standalone applications to high-level industrial protocols like CANopen or CANopen-FD.
The components are also the world’s first RISC-V implementation in a monolithic high voltage technology, allowing direct driving of N-channel MOSFETs controlling BLDC, stepper, brush-DC and voice-coil motors.
