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Poll: Are You Interested in Roadtesting a 3-phase Motor Drive Eval Board with Sensorless Field Oriented Control?

I have been given 3 kits by Infineon (thanks!) of this 3-PH motor drive evaluation board with FOC sensorless control for BLDC or PMSM motors. I wanted to give you some information about this board, as well as key documents in order to determine who would like to roadtest it. From my point of view, as roadtest program manager, I feel it is cutting-edge hardware technology that will find its way in a lot of different applications and products such as motor control & drives, heating, home appliances, IoT, power supplies (SMPS), pumps, and more.

 

So, let me give you the high points of this product:

 

It's an evaluation board that includes discrete Superjunction (SJ) MOSFET andgate-driver ICs for motor drives application. It's three-phase inverter power stage with 600V blocking voltage - up to 100W. In combination with iMOTIONTm controller, the user spin a motor quickly with a smooth start-up using inductive sensing.

 

Infineon describes it as "High voltage motor driver evaluation board with CoolMOSTm PFD7 SJ MOSFET and iMotionTm controller: Three-phase inverter power stage with half-bridge gate-driver IC based on CoolMOSTm PFD7, the latest Infineon’s SJ technology with fast body diode."

eval board

The board is designed to provide easy to use power stage based on Infineon's discrete CoolMOSTm Superjunction MOSFET. The board is equipped with all assembly groups for sensorless field oriented control (FOC). It provides a single-phase AC-connector, rectifier, and three-phase output for connecting the motor. The power stage also contains emitter shunts for current sensing and a voltage divider for DC-link voltage measurement.

 

The board can be easily interfaced through iMOTIONTm Link. This tool is designed to program and debug IMC100 and all future series of iMOTIONTm motor control ICs. This tool doesn't come with the board, so tell me if you feel you need it for the roadtest

imotion link

 

Here's a few features:

Low BOM count due to the CoolMOSTm PFD7 and latest iMOTIONTm algorithm

Smooth startup using inductive sensing

Best light-load efficiency solution

Sensorless field-oriented control (FOC)

Ease of use with graphical user interface (GUI)

 

It has a lot of stuff! Here's a list of components:

Gate-driver ICs for motor drives application  (2ED28073J06F)

600V CoolMOSTm PFD7 SJ MOSFET  (IPN60R1K5PFD7S)

iMOTIONTm motor controller with Motion Control Engine (IMC101T-T038)

Silicon Schottky Diode (BAT54-03W)

Monolithic integrated fixed NPN type voltage regulator (IFX1117ME V33)

 

I've added links to documentation below.

 

I would suggest you look at the getting started guide, since it shows you the set up for testing: https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-Getting_started_EVAL_DRIVE_3PH_PFD7-AdditionalTechnicalInformation-v01_00-EN.pdf?fileId=5546d462700c0ae601702e8abc6d68c4

 

I liked animation on this page: https://www.infineon.com/cms/media/pss-3dmodels/3-phase-motor-drive/

 

Here's the sponsor's product page with links to a lot of documents: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/evaluation-boards/eval_drive_3ph_pfd7/#!documents

 

This app note covers an overview of the evaluation board EVAL_DRIVE_3PH_PFD7, including its main features, key data, pin assignments, schematics and layout. It also describes how to quickly get started with this kit and take advantage of Infineon’s CoolMOSTm PFD7 superjunction (SJ) MOSFETs, 2ED gate-driver IC and microcontroller iMOTIONTM IMC100 series: https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-Evaluationboard_EVAL_DRIVE_3PH_PFD7-ApplicationNotes-v01_01-EN.pdf?fileId=5546d4626f229553016fa800964b53f6

 

This page provides info on the Isolated Debug Probe for iMOTIONTm motor control ICs: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/evaluation-boards/imotion-link/

  • i wish it was more in the 300-400 watt range

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Gough is correct. It's single phase on the input  (85V to 265V)  and three-phase on the output

  • in reply to dougw

    From what I can tell , you don't need three-phase AC power for this one - input is a single phase up to 230V AC. Instead, it synthesises the necessary output to drive a three phase motor of up to 100W from this input to smoothly drive the motor ... similar to how a single-phase input, three-phase output VFD would work.

     

    - Gough

  • Pretty nice controller.

    I don't have the means to test it.

    I have a drawer full of motors, but none would be a mate to this controller. Actually one might work, but it is a long shot.

    I also don't have 3-phase power.

  • I selected that I don't have the skills to RoadTest the product, but it's perhaps more the case that I don't exactly have a mains-powered 3-phase AC motor of <100W that I'm looking to control and even if I did, I'm not sure exactly what I might be using it for. A super-complicated desk fan seeing that we're still in summer? Who knows.

     

    Doing testing with mains voltages does entail some risk, hence the need for the isolated debug probe to program/run the unit as well, but also requires some care especially if probing the voltages to analyse board operation (e.g. the use of high-voltage differential probes for oscilloscopes). The quick start makes things look simple, but characterising the motor could be an additional hurdle if you have one that doesn't provide the necessary parameters provided (inductance, Ke, etc).

     

    It does look pretty interesting as a solution - a rather small and compact three-phase VFD essentially is my understanding ... hmm.

     

    - Gough