Magnetics 2010 and Motion, Drive & Automation

There is a small industry conference that takes place every year with a lineup of industry experts that is top notch by any standard.  It’s called the Motion, Drive and Automation Conference put on by E-Drive magazine.  This year it is located at the Disney Hilton Resort in Orlando and is taking place on January 28 & 29.   The conference includes a wide range of industry experts from many fields of advanced electric motor design, advanced motor control concepts, power semiconductors and state of the art motor testing system.  There will be a lot of technical and product presentations that showcase leading edge technology in electric motors, precision gear reducers, new technology for motion sensing, and a number of improved power semiconductor devices for the motor control industry.  This is a great place to get up to date on the latest technology that will impact of motor and control technology across many industries over the next few years.

In addition, the Magnetics 2010 Conference will be running concurrently at the same venue.  Magnets are a strategic material without which many motors would simply not operate.  In the ever-changing motor industry, there is always a new design that seeks to make an enhancement over previous solutions, or introduce a new solution to old problems.  Declining prices for Neodymium Iron Boron magnets over the last few years have created a number of novel design shifts which have been instrumental in bringing more varieties of permanent magnet machines into the forefront of motion control and mechatronic technology.  To the point where over the last two years a resurgance of permanent magnet rotor designs have been created to improve the energy denisty and lower the cost of specialty motors in washing machines and air conditioning compressors.

This last development, combined with the forecast increase of hybrid electric car sales coming this year, are expected to increase the sale of permanent magnets by 10-15 percent by 2011.  That’s a staggering jump in a market that is almost exclusively supplied by China.  And there is no assurance that China can meet the forecast production.

The US Department of Commerce usually has a say in the sale of products or businesses to foreign countries that are deemed to be strategic or sensitive technology.  In fact, I got stuck in a situation where my employer was told specifically that we could not sell a CNC controller to a Korean customer.  That’s pretty small potatoes compared to controlling the supply of permanent magnets which influences billions of dollars worth of electric motors manufactured and sold all over the world.  So it strikes me as a little odd that the sale of Magnequench to its current owners, Neo Materials, was completed without a much discussion. leaving the US without a domestic magnet supplier.

There will surely be a lot of discussion about this situation at the conference, and I will be in attendance to get the latest information on the subject.  So look forward to a review of the conference in an upcoming post.

Chips, Chips, Chips

Semiconductor manufacturing is still a little bit like magic.  It’s hard to imagine packing millions of transistor into tiny spaces and creating  cellphones, computers, flat screen television, digital cameras, CD players and so forth.  And the industry keeps pumping out the innovations.

And there are so many technologies, all focused on solving application problems but balancing the economics of development cost and manufacturing scalability.  Where would the Oui or iPhone be without accelerometers that are really inexpensive?  Fax machines without G3 communications chips,  or $49 printers without stepping motor chips and ink jet controls?  All benefits of high volume economy of scale.

Industrial control systems have generally required chip technology, but in numbers of chips considered too small to merit custom designed solutions.  But the Rockwell Control Logix concept breaks the partitioning of applications by applying the same control processor to all kinds of control equipment, variable frequency drives, programmable controllers, HMI’s, you name it.

Is there an ultimate chip?  A chip solution that does everything?  Not really.  But the wizards of the microcircuitry world keep coming up with new architectures.  New approaches to existing applications that offer price or performance attributes that will hopefully trigger lots of new designs that result in breakthrough products.

Recent trade press is buzzing about a new processor that combines the logic solving capability of FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) with ARM (Advanced Risc Machines).

FPGA excels in the ability solve logic, and has scaled up to massive numbers of gates and tremendous processor speeds to solve enormously complex applications.  Even applications requiring real time operation like motor control can be solved through FPGA with proper attention to detail.   Applications that were considered impossible a few years ago are now within the range of these processors.

But using gate arrays may not be the most efficient way to do motor control.  Hard real time motor control requires a great deal of analog processing to monitor conditions in the real world (like voltage and current) and the ability to respond to dynamic changes through complex programming and mathematical models.  Much easier for ARM processors with super efficient instruction sets and single cycle multiplication and division.  In some designs 16 channels of high resolution A to D converters and direct PWM capabilities.

So combining the two technologies seems like the ideal solution for a huge range of industrial control applications.  And if you get it all in one processor, wouldn’t that be great?

I  can’t wait to see what new product developments take place in the next few years with this kind of processing power available.

Solar Power, Mechatronics and Economics

At the recent Semicon show the big buzz was about the emerging Solar Energy industry. Lots of “new” products, lots of buzz. The big semiconductor machinery manufacturers who view crystalline solar cells as a stimulus to the demand for machinery and silicon have put in a lot of effort. The main goal? Get the cost of the solar cells down to where electricity produced with silicon is comparable to the cost of electricity generated by fossil fuel.

And, in fact, the industry is getting there. The current estimates are that solar power is costing about the same as peak demand consumer power, $.23/kWh. And with the current wave of investment and scale up, something which the semiconductor industry has always done well, there is serious forecasting that the cost of solar electricity will continue to fall. Read more

Mineral Insulated Thermocouples

Versatile mineral insulated (MgO) thermocouples are constructed with the thermocouple element compacted in high-temperature magnesium oxide and protected by an integral metal sheath.

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Encoders for Linear Motors in the Electronics Industry

As more semiconductor machines incorporate linear motors, it is crucial to select the right position encoder. Encoders with optical scanning methods enhance the accuracy, speed stability, and thermal behavior of a direct drive.

By Dr. Jens Kummetz,
Marketing Application Development,
Dr. Johannes Heidenhain GmbH

The semiconductor industry continues to demand tighter precision and faster operating speeds from machines in order to satisfy growing demands on quality, production, and size reduction. Linear motors are becoming more important in such highly dynamic applications that use one or more feed axes. The benefits of direct drive technology are low wear, low maintenance, and more throughput.
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Inductive Sensors

The E52Q Pancake style has an extended sensing range to 100mm, and the E56 Cube style has an extended sensing range to 40mm.

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Silicon and the Economy

The semiconductor industry is the largest economic segment of the US economy. We still dominate in a few areas. Semiconductor equipment, hard disk drives, computers as finished products, laser printers and inkjets are some of the product areas where American companies continue to dominate. And a lot of the innovation that drives technology originates in the US. Read more

Silicon, the Final Frontier (2)

When you consider the technical issues of making semiconductors, it seems impossibly difficult. Semiconductor fabrication requires lithographic processes to create features that are measured fractions of an Angstrom, the unit of measure of wavelengths of light. Pretty small. The least contamination or vibration that isn’t supposed to be there can ruin parts.

Wafer polishing machines must polish the slices of silicon to a flatness and perfection that can’t be measured by conventional means. Multi-axis robots handle silicon wafers in vacuum chambers without putting the tiniest scratch on the surface. Wafer cassettes with $250 to $500K worth of uncut chips have to be shuttled from process machine to process machine inspected and tested for defects. Read more

Silicon, the Final Frontier

It used to be said that what’s good for Detroit is good for America.  This idiom referred to the dominant role of the automotive manufacturing in the American economy.  During the boom of the 1950’s and 60’s many controls companies grew into their current positions as dominant controls suppliers by developing ever more powerful solutions for automating the auto makers.

It is somewhat ironic that as we move into the e-tainment era of the 2010’s, surrounded by e-media delivered by ever more powerful portable electronics, that the US semiconductor industry is at least the size of, and by some accounts, a much larger enterprise than the auto industry.   The Department of Commerce shows semiconductor manufacturing at $90B for 2002 and computer manufacturing at about $88B, some of which of course is overlapping.  If you start adding all the flat screen display, cellphones, well, you get the picture.  Semiconductors enable so many products that we take for granted, it is hard to estimate the impact. Read more

On-Wafer Evaluation of MEMS Devices

Testing at Earliest Stages in Development Can Help Lower Costs of Microelectromechnaical Systems.

By Mitsuhiro Nakamura
Agilent Technologies, Inc.

Recently, various devices using MEMS technology such as pressure sensors, accelerometers, and RF MEMS have been commercialized. Additionally, new devices such as silicon microphones, are rapidly evolving. The MEMS market started with the automotive industry and has been expanding to consumer products such as cellular phones.

This MEMS market expansion also applies pressure on manufacturers to lower their costs per device. However there are few opportunities for cost reduction. The limiting factors include:

• Low yields due to the precision process
• Slow throughput due to application of the physical stimulus.

A recent study (item 1 in the Appendix) estimates that 80% of the total production cost is attributed to the device packaging process and how defective chip inflow to the packaging process can contribute to cost increases. Therefore, we will discuss how to evaluate MEMS elements at the on-wafer stage in order to lower the total production cost.

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