Robots in the industrial field can help companies reduce time and labor costs, which is the future trend of market development. Chips are usually used in the control system of industrial robots. An industrial robot is generally equipped with chips such as MCU, DSP, and FPGA.
FPGA
The FPGA chip has the advantages of high speed, parallelism, rich computing and pin resources, flexible functions, direct hardware implementation of algorithms, simple and efficient operand access mechanism, and development and debugging methods that can directly detect the underlying hardware, etc.
The use of FPGAs in servo drives is a common practice in the robotics industry, and compared to CPUs, FPGAs are a preferable solution for executing image processing algorithms. When executing artificial intelligence algorithms, FPGA is the mainstream solution alongside CPU, and has a great advantage in terms of power consumption
In addition to shortening the development and verification cycle compared to ASIC development, the use of FPGAs enables rapid logic changes when problems arise, or the ability to modify or enhance functional requirements when necessary
The characteristics of the FPGA chip can improve servo control performance and reduce power consumption; in addition, the FPGA chip can provide a variety of hardware IP including PCI Express, which can realize the integration of peripheral logic while ensuring the reliability of the bus connection, and promote the miniaturization of the circuit and reduce power consumption
Reduced power consumption means fanless enclosures can be used, eliminating the need for wear-prone mechanical parts and avoiding dust inhalation
The service life of industrial equipment is usually as long as 10 years or longer, so it is necessary to consider extending the supply period of equipment in terms of maintenance. The extended robot product life cycle of FPGA can meet the demand for product usage time in the industrial field
MCU Chip
MCU is a type of chip that is widely used in the robot execution layer. As the core control device of industrial robots, the rapid growth of the robot market has also driven the MCU market. Industrial robots have a single robot arm, and most of the built-in controllers are MCU chips
For the MCU in the application direction of the robot, in addition to providing an easy-to-develop embedded platform and design tools, it is also very important to establish a complete communication environment around the MCU to handle various industrial communication protocols (such as USB, SPI), etc.
Compared with traditional industrial robots, humanoid robots have more complex motion patterns and require high-precision control of the position, direction, speed and torque of the motors
The MCU can perform complex, high-speed calculations required for motor control. Current robot solutions include:
Single motor platform —— one MCU controls one motor
Dual-motor platform —— One MCU controls two motors
The total power of the two motors of the dual-motor platform is less than the maximum power of the single motor
In the future, MCUs designed under more advanced technology will adopt higher-performance cores, and their performance will be greatly improved, and market demand will increase rapidly
DSP Chip
DSP (Digital Signal Processing) is a chip that can realize digital signal processing technology. The interior of the DSP chip adopts the Harvard structure that separates the program and data, has a special hardware multiplier, widely uses pipeline operations, and provides special DSP instructions, which can be used to quickly implement various digital signal processing algorithms
DSP chip has been developed rapidly since its birth, benefiting from the development of integrated circuits on the one hand, and benefiting from the huge market on the other hand. In just a few decades, DSP chips have been widely used in many fields such as communications, radar, imaging, military, instruments, automation, and signal processing.
DSP chips are used in the field of industrial robots, which are equivalent to the role of human joints. With the control of DSP, the robot responds more quickly and acts more precisely. Industrial robots need to process a large amount of data in their work. As the application of industrial robots becomes more and more extensive, the use of DSP chips in this area will also increase, and its importance, economy, and practicability will be reflected
IGBT Chip
The traditional industrial control and power supply industries are the cornerstones that support the steady development of the IGBT market. Industrial control is the first generation of IGBT applications, and the demand has been growing steadily and continuously. With the deepening of industrial automation, widely deployed industrial robots and intelligent machine tools rely on powerful and flexible AC motors, servo motors, and energy-saving inverters and power supply units
IGBT power semiconductor devices are the core devices in the field of power electronics applications. Taking electric energy as the processing object, the electric energy is rectified, stabilized, switched, and frequency-converted through power electronic technology to achieve high-efficiency and high-quality conversion
Power semiconductors are the core devices that constitute power electronic conversion devices, especially in high-power, high-current, high-frequency, high-speed, low-noise and other application fields, which play an irreplaceable key role, and are widely used in the field of industrial control
In addition, the CPU is also the main chip in the field of industrial control. With the development of robots, it is necessary to realize control, grasping point analysis, visual target recognition, etc. in a more diverse and complex environment, all of which require computing power support. FPGAs alone are not enough
Who Provides The Robot Chip
1. Major suppliers of FPGA chips
Intel —— provides solutions for various application scenarios by providing processor plus FPGA, equipped with OpenVINO toolkit and oneAPI
XILINX (previously acquired by AMD) - has a mature platform for robotics
2. MCU chip suppliers
Many well-known MCU manufacturers have also accumulated in the field of robotics. TI provides a complete set of robotic solutions; Renesas, NXP, Microchip, STMicroelectronics, Infineon, etc. also provide a variety of optional solutions. The components provided by enterprises are more diverse, not limited to central control chips
3. DSP chip supplier
Major manufacturers include Texas Instruments, ADI, NXP, etc., among which Texas Instruments accounts for a higher proportion
With the development and improvement of technology and the constant changes in market demand, industrial robots in the future must not only have the original perception and movement capabilities, but also have more intelligent capabilities such as memory, decision-making, language understanding, and image recognition. Robot chips The requirements will also increase, and there may be more types of chips to meet different needs in the future
