Microsemi and Trinamic have put together a motor control kit featuring Microsemi's SmartFusion evaluation kit and Trinamic's motor control daughterboard. The customizable system-on-chip (cSoC) technology offers three useful features for implementing complex motor control algorithms: an embedded ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller, programmable analogue fabric, and programmable digital fabric (FPGA). The microcontroller handles task management, algorithm execution and system connectivity; the analogue fabric supports sensing and control for voltage, current and temperature monitoring; and the flash FPGA logic enables hardware acceleration and math co-processing.

The evaluation kit features an FPGA with 200,000 gates, 256 KB flash memory, 64 KB SRAM, additional distributed SRAM in the FPGA fabric and an external memory controller, along with a host of connectivity peripherals, timers, ADCs, DACs and other analogue resources. The motor control daughterboard supports parallel operation of BLDC and stepper motors (with separate power supplies) with Hall sensors or ABN encoders and is tightly coupled to the analogue I/O and analogue computing engine on the main board. The kit also includes a stepper motor, a brushless DC motor, and a power supply with international plugs.