Information Technologies for Distributed Machine Drives: An Overview

The exponential growth experienced by the semiconductor manufacturing field has led to a large proliferation of devices with large amounts computational power, enabling countless technologies and revolutionizing many fields. Control systems and machine drives are certainly among them. Much research is being carried out to develop multi-phase and fully segmented machines, with their inherent fault tolerance. To take full advantage of the redundancy and load sharing capabilities of the machine structure, with multiple winding sets, a suitable distributed control method must be used. A high performance network between the drives is thus required. This paper will present an overview of the available communication protocols that are used in the field and evaluate how suitable are they to this new class of very demanding real time tasks.