Power Analysis of Embedded Multi-Core Systems for the Sensorless Operation of Multiple Electrical Drives

Sensorless control methods are innovative techniques to meet increasing demands on quality and functionality for electrical drive applications. For a power efficient control of multiple drives, we propose the use of embedded multi-core systems for this filed of application. In order to show how the power consumption of embedded multi-core motor controllers scales for the sensorless control of up to three PMSMs, we determine the power consumption of suitable single-, double- and triple-core systems. For this purpose, we structure the embedded systems into different levels of electrical components and calculate their individual power consumption according to measurements of the systems input voltage and currents. The results show, that multi-core motor-controllers become more power efficient for the sensorless control of two and more drives. Compared to a corresponding number of single-core-based controllers, using a multi-core architecture can reduce the power consumption on the part of the motor control systems by about 44% for the control of two drives and by 57% for three.