Embedded Multi-Core Systems for the Integration of Multi-Axis Motor-Controllers for Sensorless Electrical Drives

Sensorless control applications are a preferred choice to meet the increasing demands on quality and functionality for electrical drive applications. For an efficient realization of this performance demanding applications, we propose the use of embedded multi-core systems for this filed of application. This is demonstrated at the example of a multi-axis motor-controller for the sensorless drive of two PMSMs. In order to reduce hardware efforts, this demonstrates the implementation and integration of typically two separated motor control systems into one multi-core system. To build this highly integrated application we show a practical-oriented approach to handle the genuine parallelism of the multi-core microprocessors. This comprises a software platform to organise the implementation and integration of the timecritical motor control functions. The evaluation of the runtime behaviour of these functions quantifies negative side effects that emerge from the parallel execution. Despite measurable side effects, the results show that the quality of the sensorless operations is not affected. The implementation and evaluation of the motor-controller help to acquire a better understanding of the behaviour of embedded multi-core systems for sensorless drive applications and to form a basis for further research.