For more than 100 years now, electric motors have been available and once fully developed they made their way into our lives from the most modern computers to the most common appliances. Electric motors are clean and quite efficient for what they can do, compared against pneumatic and hydraulic means of actuation, and provided you select the right motor for the right application. Freescale offers comprehensive motor control solutions for virtually all electric motor topologies. Digital Signal Controller (DSC) motor control applications allow precise programming of drive waveforms and control over power consumption, while reducing noise. They also provide either vector or vectorless control depending on application need and motor type; the DSC type can be selected to match exact design requirements.

Along with other players in the market, Freescale is one of the main actors in the motor control solutions field. The word “solution” in this case designates a broad range of aspects covered by the portfolio of the company including: MCUs, MPUs, DSCs, sensors, development tools, software and drivers, application notes, demos, reference designs, expertise and technical support. No wonder then they are preferred by many in the industry, covering basically most types of motor and a huge number of application types.

A quick look based on the motor type indicates that solutions are available for driving basically any type of conventional electric motor.

Brushed DC Motor

Simplistically speaking the brushed DC motor is nothing more than a coil rotating between two (or more) permanent magnets. Since it has been around for a very long time, there are many variations, all of them bringing advantages and disadvantages. What is common to most of them, though, is the way of driving them and that is basically through an H-bridge made up of 4 power switches (transistors, basically). This way of driving them allows the use of PWM method, and gives you control over both the speed and the direction in which the motor spins.

The above architecture uses a Freescale controller to measure the current through the windings of the motor, to determine the position using an encoder and to generate the PWMs that control the Analog Power ASIC which is generating the high currents necessary for the motor to run. This configuration allows the addition of several other control loops, like high-precision speed and torque control. It finds applications in robotics, traction control, servo systems, automotive and even office equipment.

Freescale offers both the appropriate controllers:

8-bit MCU: 908MR, 9S08GB and 9S08AC families;
16-bit DSC: MC56F80x, MC56F80xx
16-bit MCU: S12X (this family of devise is deeply rooted in the automotive market
32-bit MCU: MCF51AC, MCF521x, MCF523x, MCP56x

and the necessary motor drivers: MPC17510, MPC17529, MPC17533, MC34920, MC34921, MC33926, MC33887, MC33899, MC33931, MC33932

Of course, for a given application you would need to select what is appropriate, but even here few good application notes can make life much easier (see: Brushed DC Motor)

Brushless DC Motor (BLDC)

Compared against the conventional brushed DC motor, the BLDC functions based on the principle that it is not the electromagnet that rotates, but the permanent magnets. In order to achieve this, the stator coils have to be driven by a DC voltage synchronously with the angular position of the rotor and by changing the polarities of these electromagnets in the stator, you force the rotor to spin in the direction you want, with the speed you want. The BLDC has a few advantages over the convention DC motor with brushes, like higher reliability and efficiency, less noise, longer lifetime, no sparks caused by the brushes, overall decreased EMI.

Most of the controllers (either MCU or DSC) recommended by Freescale for brushed DC control will be also appropriate for the BLDC. The motor drivers are different however: MC33927, MC33937, MC34923 while the application notes available are completed by full reference designs taking away the pain of feeling like going in uncharted territory (see: DC Motors - Brushless DC Motor (BLDC))

Stepper Motor
When an application requires precise position control, then it is no doubt that the stepper motor is required. Efforts have been invested in obtaining less inertia from the DC motor types (resulting in the appearance of what are called servomotors), but up to this day the leading type of electric motor used in precisely positioning a mechanical piece of equipment has been the stepper motor and the main reason is that it can achieve this precise positioning without any positional feedback, therefore significantly reducing the overall cost of the system (sensors are rather expensive). The stepper motor comes in different shapes and sizes and there are countless ways of controlling it.

Freescale supports stepper motor control development under every aspect, supplying the control units that generate the necessary PWM signals:

8-bit MCU: 908JK/JL, 908MR, 908QT/QY, 908QB, 908QC, 908GP, 908GR, 9S08AW,
9S08GB, 9S08GT, 9S08QG, 9S08QD, 9S08E6xx
16-bit DSC: MC56F80x, MC56F80xx, MC56F83xx
32-bit MCU: MCF51AC, MCF521x, MCF523x, MPC56x, MPC55xx

and quite a diverse pool of high power drivers to choose from: MC33932, MC34920, MC34921, MC34923, MPC17533, MC33887, MC33899, MC33926, MC33931, MPC17529, MPC17531, MM908E626, MM908E621, MM908E625, MC33970, MC33976, MC33977, MC33991

The proposed architectures allow for both conventional drive of the stepper motor and the useful microstepping method of control (see: Stepper Motor)

AC Induction Motors (ACIM)
As the name indicates, the ACIMs are not DC motors. They are destined for completely different applications being highly efficient (thus suitable for high dynamic requirements) and allowing very precise speed/torque control.

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