By allankliu Oct 15th, 2009
Freescale has an interesting product line: embedded MCU plus power, MM908Exxx. It is a combination of analog features such as high side and low side switches, H-bridge stepper motor drivers using SMARTMOS technologies with Freescale standard flash microcontroller (HC08/HC12) in a single package. It is also named as Intelligent Distributed Control devices (IDC), which is designed for distributed DC stepper motor and relay control.
MM908Exxx:
- MM908E621: Quad Half-Bridge and Triple High-Side with Embedded MCU and LIN
- MM908E622: Quad Half-Bridge, Triple High-Side and EC Glass Driver with Embedded MCU and LIN
- MM908E624: Triple Hi-Side switch with embedded MCU + Power + LIN
- MM908E625: Quad Half H-bridge with Power Supply + HC08 + LIN
- MM908E626: Integrated stepper motor driver with embedded MCU and LIN
From the datasheets and applications notes for IDCs, most of the applications are automotive oriented, such as power window, roof window and high-end mirror. Each IC integrates high performance M68HC908EY16 core with 16KB flash memory and 512B RAM. The analog part includes LIN physical layer interface, voltage regulator, reset and watchdog, optional chip temperature sensor as well as various analog power circuits, which is part dependency. The power part could be high side driver, half bridge driver with diagnostic. The microcontroller connects to the analog part with internal SPI bus. I believe the IC package contains two IC dice inside, one is microcontroller, and the other is so-called system basis chip with analog features. Using wire bonding technology to integrate analog chip and controller in single package is quite popular in semiconductors industry. This reminds me of my experience for UOC (Ultramate One Chip), a TV single chip from Philips/NXP, it has 128KB 8051 microcontroller and high integrated TV chip.
Obviously, it can be a general purpose stepper motor oriented controller if it is widely available from the market. The stepper motor is widely used in industrial automation, robot, consumer electronics and automotives. A modern robot, even an educational or entertainment robot like Pleo, is equipped with many distributed control nodes. As indicated from Wikipedia, Pleo uses ATMEL ARM7 as main processor, NXP LPC ARM7 as sub processor for camera, audio, as well as four 8-bit microcontrollers for motor control. MM908Exxx is suitable for these applications, since it can reduce the BOM count and cost.
There are some other examples which may use such IDC, sunlight tracker solar cell panel, which keeps tracking the optimized angle against the sunlight, so the solar cell can generate maximum power to the battery. Additionally, these parts can be designed in safes, electronics locks of access control system, which require motor or relay drivers (not stepper motor driver, just simpler driver). As these devices are facing to the connectivity requirement, the internal LIN/CAN interface of IDC is much helpful.
IDC definitely offers much better performance than existing discrete solutions. So far, most designers still stick on the discrete solutions, or using other microcontroller and analog companion chip, because they worry about the failure of the power devices and system cost. Device availability and inventory management are extra issues for these applications since IDC is a single source product. From long term view, these issues will be ignored, and designers will move to high level integration.
The evalution kit for IDC is available from Freescale web site, from 200 USD to 500 USD, depends on the model.
Reference
Pleo from Wikipedia
SmartMOS Power Technology
Embedded MCU with Power
System Basis Chip
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