Total Ownership Cost of Motor Controller

浅谈选择电机控制器的总成本

Almost every financial decision we make involves a tradeoff between specifications and price.  This is especially true when sourcing controllers for motor control.  Whether you need just 5 ADC channels or 12?  Whether you need hardware trip zone protection or not? ...  There are compromises that have to be made here and there.

我们所作的几乎每一个选择都需要在性能与价格中做出权衡，对于选择一颗电机控制器亦是如此。比如ADC通道数到底需要5路还是12路？是否需要硬件的Trip Zone保护？方方面面都需要做出权衡。

There are many old sayings that are full of wisdoms.  “Cheap things cannot be good”; “you buy cheap, you buy twice” …  It is unwise to pay too much, but it is even worse to pay too little.  When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that’s all.  When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything.  The common law of business prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it simply cannot be done.  If you deal with the lowest bidder, you might want to add opportunity cost to get a comprehensive estimate.

俗话说：“便宜没好货，好货不便宜”。太高的花费是不明智的，但是如果花费过少，则通常带来更大的损失。当你花了大价钱买了一件好商品，你唯一损失的是钱。当你为了省钱买了一件劣质品，你损失了全部。商业世界的法则是你永远没有办法花的很少却获得的很多，因为这根本无法实现。当面对各种选择时，除了表面的价格，更需要考虑到商品背后的机会成本。

When picking motor controller for sensorless control, you may not realize that the controllers you buy actually cost a lot more than the initial paid price.  A management team needs to weigh in the following factors to determine the comprehensive cost of products.  They are bills of materials, development cost, time to market, and quality of the products.

当为无感控制选择一颗电机控制器的时候，你可能意识不到你最终实际付出的成本会远远高于你当初购买芯片的价格。管理团队需要将以下因素纳入到其产品的综合成本中来考虑，BOM成本，开发成本，时间成本和产品质量。

Bill of materials (BOM):  BOM or product structure is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product. The trend of higher integration is mainly driven by the desire to reduce BOM.  This is a visible cost which is understood without much confusion;

物料清单（BOM）：BOM或产品结构是一份包含各种原材料、子组件、中间组件、零件以及制造最终产品所需的每种数量的清单。为了更好的减少BOM，降低显性成本，更高的集成度变为了一种趋势。

Development cost: for motor manufacturers, motor parameters vary to accommodate various load and application scenarios.  Sensorless control offers advantages such as simplified motor manufacturing process, improved reliability and enhanced performance.  But it does pose challenges during development stage.  Nowadays, the usual way to deal with these challenges is to tune each motor and each load separately.   Users need to spend countless engineering hours and have to manage many versions of firmware for different products. Therefore, online parameters identification, adaptive control and other advanced algorithms are necessary in order to enable proliferation of sensorless control in motor applications.

开发成本：对于电机制造商，不同的负载和应用场景对电机参数有不同的要求。无传感器控制具有简化电机制造过程、提高可靠性和提高性能的优势。但在开发阶段也存在一定的挑战。目前，应对这些挑战的通常方法是分别调试每个电机和每个负载。用户需要花费大量的调试时间，同时为不同的产品管理多个版本的固件。因此，为了更广泛的普及无传感器控制，在线参数辨识、自适应控制和其他先进的算法显得十分必要。

Time to market: when we interviewed with engineering heads at our customers, their most painful point is to deliver the product on time.  In the past, due to high silicon cost, firmware engineers had to write very efficient firmware on a perfectly sized silicon.  For example, fix point arithmetic prevails and assembly code is adopted here and there.  The downside of this approach is that it is prone to errors.  Engineers, especially junior engineers, often make mistakes when sizing fix point numbers.  They are not trained in school to write assembly code any more.  Black-box function tests do not have enough test coverage.  Therefore, errors are usually corner cases and are found very late in the development or after product initial release.

时间成本：当我们与客户的工程主管交谈时，他们最痛苦的一点是如何按时交付产品。在过去，由于芯片的价格贵，固件工程师不得不通过编写非常高效的固件来尽量降低所需芯片的性能和存储空间。例如，当时流行使用定点计算和汇编代码。这种做法非常容易出错。对于工程师，尤其是初级工程师，在转换定点数字时经常会犯错误。他们在学校里也不再接受编写汇编代码的训练。黑盒函数测试也没有足够的测试覆盖率。因此，错误通常是在开发后期或在产品初始发布之后才会被发现。

Quality of products: the recall from the field is arguable the most horrible nightmare for any brand owner.  It not only puts a dent on the brand reputation, but also consumes enormous corporate resources to fix the problem.  The quality of an IC comes from many careful considerations.  At each stage of design, validation, reliability qualification, product final test, a significant investment of time and money is required.  Brand owners are very careful in sourcing parts and components for their product.

产品质量：产品从市场被召回对任何品牌所有者来说都是最可怕的噩梦。不仅损害了品牌声誉，而且耗费企业大量人力物力来解决问题。芯片的质量需要考虑方方面面，在设计、验证、可靠性认证和产品最终测试的每个阶段，都需要投入大量的时间和金钱。品牌所有者在为他们的产品寻找零部件时需要格外的谨慎。

Spintrol was founded in late 2014.  Team Spintrol dedicates itself to industrial and automotive field.  In particular, the team focuses on motor control in the near term and provide products meet the high standards of customers.

Spintrol成立于2014年底，致力于深耕工业和汽车领域。在近期，团队专注于电机控制领域并提供满足客户高标准的产品。

From chip perspective, the key differentiations of Spintrol motor control products are higher performance and higher integration. Higher performance means high computing performance, sufficient memory for real time sensitive code execution and storage; and advanced motion control peripherals. Higher integration reduces BOM counts which improve reliability and lower the system cost.  Spintrol provides 3 different level products for customer to choose: controllers, SoC with pre-driver and fully integrated SoC.

从芯片的角度来说，Spintrol电机控制产品的差异化在于更强的性能和更高的集成度。更强的性能意味着强劲的计算性能，满足高实时性代码执行和存储的内存空间和先进的运动控制外设。更高的集成度减少了BOM的数量，提高了可靠性，降低了系统成本。Spintrol提供3种不同集成度的产品供客户选择：控制器、集成预驱的SoC和全集成的SoC。

All the analog components needed,  such as 14-bit ADC with 140 ns conversion time, PGAs with differential input, comparators with DAC reference input, are fully integrated inside controllers. Compared with controllers, SoC with pre-driver further integrates pre-driver and power management. Fully integrated SoC takes integration to another level by integrating driving stages. Different products help customer to choose the best fit product for their applications and reduce the total BOM cost, not only in components, but also in PCB size and assembly cost.

控制器产品集成了所有需要的模拟外设，如具有14位精度和140ns转换时间的ADC，支持差分输入的PGA，具有DAC参考输入的比较器等等。与控制器相比，集成预驱的SoC进一步集成了预驱和电源管理。全集成SoC内部集成了预驱和功率器件，将集成度提升到了另一个层次。客户可以选择最适合他们应用的产品，不仅仅在器件层面，而且在PCB尺寸和组装成本上来降低总的BOM成本。

Higher performance and higher integration significantly reduce time to market and lowers development difficulty for customers’ product team.

更高的性能和更高的集成显著减少了开发时间并降低了客户产品团队的开发难度。

In order to reduce customer’s development cost and time to market, Spintrol also put a great deal of efforts into the development of world-class motor software, motor turning GUI tools and even turkey-solutions. Spintrol’s motor-ware has the characterization of high performance, good adaptability to various motor parameters and qualified through white-box test in simulation and in lab, which provides a very good foundation for customer to develop their own motor control software. For key applications, Spintrol also provides mass production level solutions to customers, including hardware design and software programs.

为了降低客户的开发成本和开发时间，Spintrol还投入大量精力开发世界一流的电机软件、图形化的电机调试工具以及完整的解决方案。Spintrol的电机软件具有高性能和良好的电机参数适应性，并且通过了详尽的仿真级别和实验室内的白盒测试的验证，为客户开发自己的电机控制软件提供了很好的基础。对于重点应用，Spintrol还为客户提供量产级别的解决方案，包括硬件设计和软件程序。

To deliver high quality products to customers, besides careful QMS from design to final test, Spintrol also sets up high bar when we select our fab and AT suppliers. So far, all the suppliers are Top 3 vendors in the industries. Till now, more than 25 million units have been shipped at our Tier 1 customers and historical shipment data provides good evidence for our quality.

为了向客户提供高品质的产品，除了囊括从设计到最终测试的严谨的质量管理系统外，Spintrol在选择外部工厂和供应商时也设立了很高的标准。所有的供应商均为业界前三名的厂商。到目前为止，旋智在大客户的出货已经超过2500万片，历史出货数据佐证了我们良好的品质管理。

At Spintrol, we not only sell ICs to our customer but also provide motor control package service to help customer in above 4 key aspects.

在Spintrol，我们不仅仅是在向客户提供芯片，而是致力于提供打包的电机控制服务来从上述4个方面更好的服务和帮助客户。

Please contact sales @ Spintrol.com for inquiry.

任何问题请联系sales @ Spintrol.com。