Renesas Demos Servo Drive on a Chip

Renesas Electronics America Inc. rolled out what is believed to be the first industrial servo drive on a chip at the Pacific Design & Manufacturing Show in Anaheim yesterday.

The device, part of the company’s RZ/T1 Motion Control Solution Kit , incorporates real-time control, networking, and an encoder interface. “All three of those components are now inside the chip,” Wil Florentino, senior marketing manager for Renesas’ Industrial Automation Segment, told Design News. “So anyone who wants to build a motion control system now has all the pieces in one place.” Renesas said the technology could be applied to robot arms, as well as on X-Y stages in CNC machines, pick-and-place systems, and inspection machinery.

The servo drive on a chip is part of Renesas’ new RZ/T1 Motion Control Solution Kit, which it showed at yesterday’s Pacific Design & Manufacturing Show in Anaheim.
(Source: Renesas Electronics)

The RZ/T1 system-on-chip (SoC) represents a departure from the conventional approach because it doesn’t require the developer to add a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to enable a motion control system to work with different types of encoders. Renesas said its new SoC is able to work without the FPGA because it incorporates an on-chip programmable block. “With the programmable block, we can change the flavor of the chip, depending on what the customer’s needs are,” Florentino told us.

By eliminating the exterior chip, Renesas says the new technology lowers bill-of-material costs and improves performance. “From a real-time perspective, you don’t have to worry about signal integrity or the speed of the interfaces because everything is on chip," Florentino said.

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The RZ/T1 system-on-chip is built around the 600-MHz ARM Cortex-R4F core and is capable of supporting two servo motors. It is part of the company’s RZ/T1 Motion Control Solution Kit, which was displayed for the first time at yesterday’s show.

Because the platform allows for users to choose various encoder interfaces and industrial protocols, Renesas expects it to appeal to a wide variety of applications. "The value proposition is there, not only for the big industrial OEMs, for the machine builders and system integrators, as well,” Florentino said.

Senior technical editor Chuck Murray has been writing about technology for 31 years. He joined Design News in 1987, and has covered electronics, automation, fluid power, and autos.