MotionFire Motor Control Platform
The FPGA-based MotionFire motor-control development platform enables engineers to quickly and cost-effectively design, prototype, and test motor applications used in a variety of industrial, automotive, medical, instrumentation, and consumer electronics equipment. MotionFire, which was launched in Europe last year, is now available in North America.
The MotionFire development platform is based on Altera’s Cyclone III FPGA. It offers a flexible and power-saving motor-control environment that supports and bridges multiple industrial networking protocols and mitigates obsolescence risk. MotionFire consists of the FireFighter FPGA-based communication baseboard and the FireDriver motor driver power modules. The platform supports state-of-the-art motor-control algorithms and communications IP, and can be used to control various motor types, including stepper, servo, and AC and DC motors, demonstrating the value FPGAs provide in multi-axis motor-control applications.
MotionFire Features
- Nios-II based reference design, in full source
- Advanced regulators implemented in hardware, VHDL source provided
- Generic current, speed and position regulators with feedback from incremental encoder or hall sensors
- Trajectory generator with linear acceleration and velocity feed-forward, implemented in software
- Generic 4-phase drivers providing up to 10A per channel at a DC-bus voltage of 50VDC
- Up to six FireDriver units can be used wich gives 24 phases or up to 12 motors
- Synchronized ADC sampling on all phases within the same PWM cycle
- Galvanic isolation on each of the six FireDriver units
- Monitoring each FireDriver units bus voltage and driver temperature
- Main board based on Altera Cyclone-III EP3C40F484 low power 65nm FPGA
- 2 x CAN, 2 x RS232/RS485 interface implemented
- Dual role Ethernet, stand alone MAC+PHY or PHYs with MII interface directly to FPGA
- 16Mbit config flash, 16Mbit dataflash for code storage, 256Mbit DDR2 SDRAM
- 40 protected user I/O, 14 leds and expansion connector for external I/F modules
- Zero jumper strategy, MagicConfig housekeeper
More info: MotionFire Motor Control Platform
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