Circuit Diagram51965608 Irina Toloknovskaia Dreamstime 60abf015c4171

A Rugged, Smart System for Motor-Drive Control

May 24, 2021

The ION/CME N-Series Digital Drives developed by Performance Motion Devices handle distributed intelligent motor-drive management.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

Performance Motion Devices’ (PMD) ION/CME N-Series Digital Drive family is a rugged, PCB-mountable intelligent motor-drive management system (see figure). The family addresses power levels from 75 to 1000 W. The drives can control brushed dc, brushless dc, and step motors. Quadrature, sin/cos, and BiSS-C encoder formats are all supported.

The ION/CME N-Series Digital Drives series of PCB-mountable controllers can be linked together in a network controlled by an optional host processor.

Each module is able to handle profile generation, servo compensation, stall detection, field-oriented control, and digital torque control in addition to other motion-control functions. The controllers can be managed via Ethernet, CAN FD, SPI, and serial interfaces, thus simplifying system design and software programming. The module incorporates PMD’s C-Motion Engine that allows users to download a control application.

Furthermore, PMD provides the Pro-Motion Windows-based application. This can be used to control and monitor a system. It also supports the C-Motion programming language. The on-board processor packs 256 kB of user code space and 256 kB of RAM. The system maintains a 20-kHz servo-loop rate and delivers up to 20 A. The controllers come in a small package that measures 38 ×38 ×17 mm.

A software development kit with C-Motion support is provided. A Developer Kit is available as well, with different versions for each type of host interface.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

You can send press releases for new products for possible coverage on the website. I am also interested in receiving contributed articles for publishing on our website. Use our template and send to me along with a signed release form.

Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.