Introduction

The applications of VLSI in motor control are getting more and more important and popular. In 1980s and 1990s, microprocessors, such as Intel's 8080, 8031, 8098, 80196 and Motorola's 68000, were mostly used in motor control. Recently, microcontroller are widely used in industry and the application of DSP and FPGA emerged in recent a couple of years. Both microcontrollers and DSPs are presently used in motor control; however, because of the real-time control algorithms that must be processed, the majority of these applications are driven by microcontrollers. This is partially due to engineers' comfort with microcontrollers and lack of familiarity with programming DSPs; however, DSPs are expected to surpass microcontrollers in the precision control of motors by 2003.


Embedded motor control applications are expected to reach 7.3 billion units by 2001 (source: Motion Tech Trends). Motor control is a significant, but often ignored, segment of embedded applications. Motor control applications span everything from washing machines to fans, hand-held power tools, and automotive window lift and traction control systems. In most of these applications there is a move away from analog motor control to precision digital control of motors.Digital control of motors permits a much moreefficient operation of the motor, resulting in longer life, lower power dissipation, and a lower overall system cost.

In motor control area, the applications of DSP and microcontroller is for control of DCmotor, brushless DC motor, brushless permanent magnet servo motor, AC inductionmotor (IM), and switched reluctance motors. In this project, a single phase IM (SPIM) isused for adjustable speed control because it is widely used in our daily life. To controlthis SPIM, two hardware implementation will be done, one is to use micro-controller PIC17C756 by Microchip and another is to use TMS320F240 by Texas Instrument.