Software building blocks and a graphical tool are designed to simplify the design and to speed up development of energy-saving intelligent motor drives. Electric motors operated by traditional on/off drives consume as much as 50% of the world's electricity. Intelligent drives enable improved energy ratings, but present complex design challenges and require expensive processors. STMicroelectronics claims that its STM32 microcontroller family and ready-to-use firmware for intelligent drives help overcome these challenges. The STM32 FOC PMSM SDK v3.0 motor-control firmware library release adds support for the low-cost STM32F100x series, enabling designers to realise intelligent drives for cost-sensitive applications. It also targets the STM32F103xx series, exploiting the large program flash memory combined with the peripheral offering, to implement a dual-motor drive in a single controller, saving cost, size and development time. The company has also introduced the MC Workbench v1.0.2, which is a graphical PC tool for the configuration of the firmware library. This simplifies the task of assembling the blocks and customising the drive. The microcontrollers' architecture integrates functions such as the timers needed for motor control. There are over 180 variants mixing features, performance and memory.
