Infineon focuses on the three major motor driving markets to meet the new challenges of the motor market

Based on a quarterly revenue comparison for fiscal 2021 and 2022, automation and drives, home appliances, and electric vehicles are the major growth areas for motor control system applications. These three pillars of motor drive can well reflect the development of global motor drive. According to the opinion of the market consulting firm's analysts and the customer's view of the market, motor drive growth is expected to be relatively flat in 2023.

Motor drive is an important application of power semiconductor, Infineon motor drive solutions cover tens of watts to tens of megawatts of various applications. Power semiconductor products include IGBTs, SiC MosFeTs, high performance AI processors, Wi-Fi Bluetooth products for wireless interconnection for Industry 4.0, security chips, IPMs using IGBTs, MosFETs and SiC Intelligent power module and high voltage and high current thyristor and motor drive chip iMOTION™; Applications include large and small household appliances, universal frequency converters, servo drives and other common factory automation equipment, locomotive traction, electric vehicles and so on.

In the application level, Infineon from home appliances to industry and high-end frequency converter and other fields of products is full coverage, among which the increase of home appliances is relatively fast efficient heating technology heat pump and frequency conversion of the general electricity. In terms of home appliances, by 2024, the frequency of changes in home air conditioners will reach 99 percent, and the frequency of changes in washing machines and refrigerators will increase year by year to 94 percent and 75 percent (a total of 600 million units). In terms of the future growth rate of home appliances market and the increase in the frequency of changes in home appliances, the potential is huge. Infineon also forecasts the market's industrial-driven growth rate at 4.8%.

1 Digital control solution

Infineon offers iMOTION digital control chip technology for motor control systems. It is a dedicated motor drive chip, using Infineon's long-term accumulation of system-level know-how (know-how), can complete single resistance sampling, sensorless dual motor control and PFC control on a single chip. Customers do not need to carry out motor control programming, simple development, short research and development cycle. It is mainly used to drive various motors with variable frequency household appliances. The control objects include press, fan, water pump and general motors. iMOTION is a highly integrated product family for speed-regulating drivers that uses DC busbar current detection or bridge arm current detection, integrates all the controls required for sensorless field oriented control (FOC) and analog interface functions. The SmartIPM subfamily achieves the highest level of integration in the entire product family. The MCE, microcontroller, grid driver and three-phase inverter bridge are integrated on a pin - less package component, constituting a complete inverter system.

Infineon also offers microcontroller (MCU) products for motor control applications. The main advantages include the following.

1) Infineon has a rich product line in MCU, including PsoCs and XMCS, which can fully cover motor drive applications from home appliances to industrial controls.

2) From the perspective of application, Infineon supports motor drives for small household appliances, white goods and industrial applications, as well as for special scenarios including medical treatment, as well as motor drives for commercial vehicles, etc., covering a very wide range.

3) From the perspective of solutions, Infineon has a mature solution team in China, which can provide customers with a complete set of solutions to meet the requirements of consumer home appliances and industrial applications of motor drives, including servo drives and frequency converters.

4) Infineon can directly provide customers with production-grade application software support, and put the production-grade software on the evaluation board for evaluation, so as to help customers further achieve better performance on their systems.

With the application of motor drive more and more widely, its digital control requirements will be higher. From the perspective of microcontroller, the continuous improvement of PSoC, XMC computing power and peripheral performance can drive the improvement of frequency conversion at the software control end and system control end, which can promote the motor from the old generation of fixed frequency drive to frequency conversion drive, and contribute to the significant improvement of motor drive energy efficiency at the system level. Combined with Infineon's IGBT or silicon carbide power devices, the microcontroller achieves maximum system-level efficiency at the hardware level. Based on our advanced technology and long-term development experience, Infineon can provide this cost-effective product. In addition, high-end motor drives need to support more specialized functions, such as need to support more industrial communication bus protocols, need to support faster electric sampling systems, etc.

For more complex motor drive systems, Infineon can provide high efficiency motor startup algorithms and FOC algorithms based on its own MCU products for customer reference. Customers can then refer to Infineon's program to design and develop their own products. In addition, Infineon is developing more efficient motor drive algorithms to match and support upcoming next-generation MCU products with higher computing power, which will further increase the efficiency of the digital control portion of the entire system.

2. Power unit in the motor system

 Infineon has built a full line of IGBT7 products in Easy, Econo module packages for motor drive applications. IGBT7 is an important product after the launch of IGBT4, it uses micro-groove technology, lower loss than IGBT4, and allows overload junction temperature up to 175 ℃, so the definition of the product meets the actual requirements of the application. The high power density of IGBT7 makes the power density of the application system greatly increased. For example, Huichuan Technology uses IGBT7's servo-driven SV660 with 1 kW, which is 39% smaller than IGBT4's predecessor IS620. The TRENCHSTOP IGBT7 and EC7 diode technologies are based on the latest microgrooving technology, allowing for significantly reduced device losses and higher controllability. The chip is optimized especially for industrial motor drive applications and solar inverter applications, resulting in significantly reduced static loss, higher power density, and improved switching softness.

Silicon carbide motor drive can bring 3 advantages, the first is the increase of power density, secondly can use natural cooling, also laid the foundation of high-speed motor drive development. The birth of SiC MOSFET technology makes it possible to have high speed power switching devices above 1 200V. The silicon MOSFET is mainly used in the middle and low voltage power field of 650V and below. In addition to high-speed switching characteristics, silicon carbide also has high thermal conductivity, high breakdown field strength, high saturated electron drift rate and other characteristics, especially suitable for high temperature, high power density, high pressure, high frequency and radiation resistance and other harsh conditions require high applications. Power density is another important aspect of device technology value. SiCMOSFET chip area is much smaller than IGBT, for example, the size of 100 A1 200 V SiCMOSFET chip is about one-fifth of the sum of IGBT and continuous secondary pipe. Therefore, in motor drive applications, the value of SiC mosFETs can be well reflected, including 650 V SiC MosFETs. 1 200 V SiC mosFETs are high-speed switching devices that can greatly simplify the topology of some application circuits, improve system power density, and reduce costs.

At the same time, silicon carbide has led to the development of packaging technology, such as the point XT technology applied to silicon carbide single tube and the Easy series power module using aluminum nitride DCB. Due to the high cost of silicon carbide chips, in order to improve its output capacity, heat dissipation will become crucial, so the need to use newer packaging technology to achieve better heat dissipation, and then improve the utilization rate of silicon carbide, so that the power density of the system is higher and more compact.

3 Other Trends

In the motor control system, sensors provide accurate sensing for motor rotation and positioning, abnormal motor vibration monitoring, and accurate positioning information in the production line. The data collected by the sensors provides predictive maintenance to minimize or even avoid the impact of abnormal components on the production process. For sensorless motors, Infineon will optimize the algorithm for startup time, startup state in various application scenarios, detection and control, so as to improve control efficiency and make the entire system run more stable. Infineon is developing the next generation of MCU for edge computing and AI controllers.

First, the MCU product can take advantage of the edge computing integration characteristics to optimize the support for applications that require AI algorithms at the motor driver side in the trend of intelligence. Second, from the perspective of sensing or data acquisition under the wave of industry 4.0, Infineon has high-performance Bluetooth products, Wi-Fi products, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi two-in-one products. These wireless connection products can be combined with sensors to form a data transmission system. Through wireless connection, the data of the whole system can be transmitted more intelligently in real time, thus improving the efficiency and energy efficiency of the whole motor system.