Green Industry ** Grasp Two Key Points

Industry 4.0 is an intelligent industry. It is also a green industry. The core feature is energy-efficient and networked, that is, people, machines, and information are connected through automatic control, network, and computing. As far as the production process is concerned, it is all about integrating all of this into a digital enterprise platform. Through data collection, analysis, and optimization, optimization is achieved, and more efficient production methods can be achieved. In such an intelligent and green manufacturing process, two key points need to be controlled: one is to improve motor efficiency, and the other is to establish a low-power network.

The robot is one of the cores of intelligent manufacturing. It is expanding from the previous automobile welding and inkjet industry to the conventional industrial application scenes such as handling, palletizing, and spot welding. The installation volume has maintained an annual growth rate of nearly 30%. From the technical point of view, the robot belongs to the servo-controlled system-level product, and the servo motor, as an executing component, plays a key role in the trajectory planning and motion control. Under current circumstances, the realization of intelligent and energy-saving motor control is the core point of intelligent manufacturing.

Another important support for smart manufacturing is interconnection. A large number of sensors are installed on more controllers and gateways. Data is transmitted to the cloud and nodes through the Internet. The information collection, aggregation, analysis, and processing of each physical node are highlighted. Due to the inconvenience and inflexibility of traditional industrial systems, it is imperative to increase the operational efficiency of industrial systems and increase the added value of industrial production through the Internet of Things (IoT) connection network and high-efficiency data processing. This transformation depends on a range of technologies, ranging from low-power wireless protocols to high-performance microcontrollers. Among these technologies, low-power wireless links and microcontrollers will play a crucial role as the core of the entire link.

Manufacturer's point of view

STMicroelectronics China's Microcontroller Marketing Manager Cao Jindong

Low-power, high-performance MCUs promote smart manufacturing

Industry 4.0 involves the use of MCUs for intelligent robots and gateway controls, including control of main CPUs, nodes and robotic arms, motor control, and sensor processing and control. It can be said that the MCU is everywhere. The MCU is like a brain. Intelligent devices must be separated from the MCU.

Of course, for smart machines, immediate response is very important and requires high power consumption and performance of the MCU. Energy management is a research topic for chip design, manufacturing process, system design, and software engineers. People try to reduce static and dynamic energy consumption as much as possible in all aspects. The traditional control voltage regulation mode and management standby mode are still adopted by most electronic devices and will continue in the future. However, with the continuous emergence of new demands such as intelligent robots and wireless sensor devices, power consumption and always-on devices The rapid increase in energy consumption management has become an important issue for the entire electronics design. The market's demand for green products has prompted manufacturers to consider adopting low-power standby modes.

MCUs, which are the soul components of embedded systems, have been very active in low-power design and energy management in recent years, and various new products have emerged.

STMicroelectronics' new STM32L4 series products use an ARM Cortex-M4 processor core with an operating frequency of 80 MHz. The built-in floating-point unit supports DSP instructions. ST’s adaptive real-time accelerator is another additional advantage of the new family of microcontrollers that enables the microcontroller to execute code in Flash without waiting, with processing performance up to 100 DMIPS and power consumption of only 100 μA/MHz. . Up to 1MB of dual-bank flash memory supports complex applications and read-write synchronization, and provides a 128kB static RAM.

The STM32L4 microcontroller takes full advantage of ST's rich low-power technology, including dynamic voltage adjustment to adjust power consumption according to different processing requirements, intelligent architecture with built-in FlexPowerControl, and power management modes with seven sub-mode options, including shutdown and standby And the lowest power 30nA shutdown mode. ST's batch acquisition mode enables processors to efficiently exchange data with communication peripherals in low-power modes.

Lokesh Duraiappah, Industrial Power Market and Application Director, Intersil Corporation

Power Management ICs Power Green Manufacturing

Now, in the network equipment market, more and more people are seeing a willingness to eliminate intermediate-level buses. If high pressure (such as 40V, 36V, 42V) can be directly reduced to the middle stage and directly converted to low voltage (such as 5V, 3.3V, 1V), it will greatly save energy. Because the current in the intermediate bus converter is very high, more losses occur in the distribution process. If you can directly reduce 48V to a low voltage, you can reduce the loss in distribution. This is a trend. Although many network equipment and data center suppliers do not have a dedicated power supply design department, many of their platform designers are also responsible for power supply design. This requires easy-to-design IC products.

In addition, with the increasing use of battery applications and battery backup, the power supply design is not only dealing with voltage input problems, but also faced with power surges that occur from time to time. Therefore, DC-DC converters must be used to solve the problems that may occur. Power surge. We have been studying these trends and challenges very carefully. Our technology roadmap seeks to be able to develop easy-to-use, high-performance products while also coping with the increasing use of batteries and battery backup in the industry.

Intersil recently introduced the first ISL8117, a 60V synchronous buck controller that avoids the intermediate step-down conversion stage commonly used in industrial applications. This synchronous step-down PWM controller's low duty cycle (minimum 40 nanosecond on-time) supports direct step-down switching from a 48V to 1V load point. This innovation allows engineers to significantly reduce system complexity and solution costs for industrial electronics, medical, and communications infrastructure applications. The ISL8117 uses valley current mode modulation with adaptive slope compensation to support stable operation of a wide range of input voltage and output voltage combinations without external compensation.

The ISL8117 reduces the size of the solution and simplifies system design without sacrificing performance. The default design values ​​of commonly used functions and the wide input voltage and output voltage range of the ISL8117 make it require fewer peripheral components than competing solutions. Engineers can design a complete DC/DC step-down conversion solution with only 10 components including MOSFETs and passive components, and achieve up to 98% conversion efficiency and 1.5% output voltage accuracy.

Xu Ke, Marketing Director, Greater China, Tektronix Technology (China) Co., Ltd.

Industry 4.0 Brings Opportunities and Challenges to Test Industry

From smart factories to smart production, manufacturers and equipment suppliers need to face complex calculations, communications, and control issues.

In terms of communications, wireless devices are everywhere, and by the year 2020, the number of mobile Internet devices will reach 50 billion, and the global wireless accessories market will reach 50.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2015. Global IP traffic reaches 1.3 zetta bytes per year; by 2016, the number of online video users will reach 1.5 billion. This will inevitably face problems such as increasing bandwidth and improving energy efficiency, as well as the need for complex testing. Tektronix offers a complete range of test equipment from real-time oscilloscopes, mixed-domain oscilloscopes, real-time spectrum analyzers, and arbitrary waveform generators to help design engineers cope with demanding design challenges.

Tektronix' new DPO70000SX ATI high-performance oscilloscope offers a number of key innovations. A 70 GHz real-time oscilloscope with Tektronix' patented asynchronous timing interleaving (ATI) technology maintains signal-to-noise ratio and improves signal fidelity. This means that users can capture and measure signals more accurately than any other oscilloscope today. 200 GS/s ultra-high sampling rate and 5 ps/sample resolution improve resolution and timing. With its compact size, the instrument can be placed very close to the device under test (DUT) and provides flexible display and control functions for analysis. Since the distance to the DUT is reduced, the cable length can be shortened and the signal fidelity can be maintained at very high frequencies. The most advanced oscilloscope system on the market uses Tektronix' patented UltraSync architecture to provide accurate data synchronization and facilitate the operation of multi-machine systems. Precision multi-channel timing synchronization is the key to meeting acquisition requirements in applications such as 100G and faster coherent light modulation analysis.