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A Rugged, Smart System for Motor-Drive Control

May 21, 2025

The ION/CME N-Series Digital Drives developed by Performance Motion Devices handles 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 three power output levels: 75, 350, and 1,000 W. The drives can control brushed DC, brushless DC, and step motors. Quadrature, sin/cos, and BiSS-C encoder formats are all supported.

The controllers come in a small package that measures 37.6 x 37.6 x 16.8 mm and delivers up to 1 kW of power. The small package makes the N-Series Digital Drives ideal for embedded control solutions in application spaces such as semiconductor, medical and automation.

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.

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.

Furthermore, PMD provides the Pro-Motion Windows-based application. Pro-Motion is primarily used by engineers to set up and tune their motors. 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.

Internal block diagram for Performance Motion Devices ION/CME N-Series Digital Drives.

Developer Kit

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.

Developer Kit includes:

ION/CME N-Series integrated hardware and software package
Pro-Motion® Software
Software Development Kit (SDK) with C-Motion®
Complete manual set
Complete cable and prototyping connector set

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.

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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.

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