MCUs specializing in motor control, power conversion

A new family of microcontrollers aims to enhance the precision and performance of motor control and power conversion in consumer and industrial applications by integrating real-time capabilities and new features. The applications these control MCUs target include home appliances, drones, power tools, renewable energy products, industrial drives, and lighting as well as server and telecom power supplies.

Figure 1 Control MCUs will serve consumer, industrial, and infrastructure applications. Source: Infineon

Infineon’s PSOC control MCUs, built around Arm Cortex-M33 core, accelerate current measurement, waveform generation, and real-time operations with extensive on-board analog functionality, high-performance timers, and hardware math acceleration. Start with a 12 Msps analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that ensures precise current and voltage measurement and real-time operation.

Figure 2 The C3P2 and C3M3 control MCUs offer robust analog, memory, and security features. Source: Infineon

Next, Infineon has upgraded the timer IP to improve speed and resolution. Timers with <100 ps pulse-width modulation (PWM) resolution allow clean waveform generation with high f_SW scalability. These waveforms support higher switching frequencies and enable smoother control of motors across speed and torque.

That makes the control MCUs wide bandgap (WBG) ready, implying that these MCUs support higher switching frequencies required to control WBG devices like silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN). “Many MCUs are not able to deliver higher frequencies when they interface with SiC and GaN devices,” said Steve Tateosian, SVP of IoT and industrial MCUs for IoT, Wireless and Compute Business at Infineon Technologies.

Another prominent feature in these control MCUs is the integration of the CORDIC accelerator to offload real-time control tasks from the CPU. The CORDIC accelerator facilitates synchronous “idle” sampling of up to 16 analog signals from the single-core ADC and that’s up to 25% faster without sampling jitter.

“General-purpose CPUs generally don’t handle motor control efficiently,” Tateosian said. “So, we put some additional hardware to accelerate some of the specific functions for motor control use cases and thus improve real-time control capability of these MCUs.”

These MCUs are PSA L2 certified for security, and for safety, Infineon provides Class B and SIL 2 compliant libraries for self checking, thus ensuring that the system is operating as it’s supposed to operate.

The PSOC control MCUs come with evaluation boards, system reference designs, debuggers, and a comprehensive family of PC-based development tools. These motor control MCUs are also supported by the ModusToolbox software platform, which encompasses field-oriented control (FOC) for brushless and permanent magnet motors, power conversion algorithms such as PFC, LLC and Buck, and device drivers.

The first two MCUs in the PSOC control family—with CPU clock speeds of 100 MHz and 180 MHz and up to 256 KB embedded flash—are now available for early-access customers. Full market availability of C3P2 and C3M3 control MCUs is planned during the first quarter of 2025.

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