Texas Instruments Collaborates with Heidenhain on SoC

Heidenhain Corporation (Schaumburg, IL) is pleased to work with Texas Instruments (TI; Dallas, TX) in the development of the semiconductor industry’s first microcontroller (MCU) utilizing the EnDat 2.2 interface as an option.

The TI C2000 MCU^TM industrial drive control System-on-Chip (SoC) delivers a complete solution with a direct connection for industrial motor and servo drives, supporting both analog and digital position sensors. The EnDat 2.2 interface from Heidenhain is well known as a digital, bidirectional interface for encoders that is capable both of transmitting position values from incremental and absolute encoders as well as transmitting or updating information stored in the encoder, or saving new information.

When combined with the DesignDRIVE Position Manager from TI, this new system eliminates the complexities of position sensor management in the industrial drive development cycle, saving ancillary components, development time and system cost. Common applications include use in industrial inverter and servo drives for robotics, CNCs, elevators, material conveyance, transportation, and other industrial manufacturing applications. The MCU system solution improves machine performance by completing decode tasks on-chip, reducing the communication latency and enabling faster control loop performance. In addition, it allows developers to decrease system cost by reducing the board area required in FPGA or ASIC-based solutions.

TI is the only semiconductor vendor that supports both digital and analog position sensors for industrial applications. They worked with Heidenhain to test this on-chip solution to ensure compatibility. “We approve of their successful implementation and testing of Position Manager to our EnDat specifications,” stated Herbert Reiter, a senior product manager at Heidenhain. “We look forward to working with them as they enable new EnDat capabilities for our customers

www.heidenhain.com, www.ti.com