Texas – Decrease system cost and complexity with new DelfinoT MCUs (C2000 Delfino)

Solving a prevalent digital motor control design problem, Texas Instruments (TI) has unveiled the 32-bit C2000 Delfino microcontroller for use as resolver-to-digital converter interfaces for motor control systems, lowering system cost while delivering more efficient motor control capabilities.

The high-performance, floating-point Delfino microcontrollers with an on-chip, high-precision analog-to-digital converter, along with an external low-cost signal conditioning circuit, provide motor control designers an alternative to more expensive and complex semiconductor solutions.

Both resolvers and encoders are used in typical precision servo motor control systems, such as industrial drives and automotive power steering and traction control. Resolvers and encoders provide shaft position feedback to the control unit, but resolvers are highly accurate and noise immune, proving more robust and rugged than encoders. However, resolvers require a special precision resolver-to-digital converter to interface to a digital control system.

The converters add complexity and cost to the motor control solution. Delfino microcontrollers can duplicate this functionality of producing the excitation signal and sampling and processing the feedback to obtain the angular reading as part of the motor control algorithms executed by these devices without the need for a dedicated resolver-to-digital converter, allowing advanced torque, speed and position control to be achieved with even greater accuracy. In addition, optimized Delfino microcontroller resolver software to ease development is available free from TI, says the company.