When Microsemi Corp. acquired Actel Corp. two years ago, the company made no secret of hoping to combine Actel’s FPGAs with the Microsemi line of precision analog and power control chips for vertical markets in industrial control.  Now, Microsemi is expanding that concept by working with TRINAMIC Motion Control GmbH of Germany to offer the type of vertically-directed design kits commonly offered by Xilinx and Altera.

The new dual motor control kit will be offered by both Microsemi and TRINAMIC (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/microsemi-and-trinamic-deliver-dual-motor-control-kit-2012-02-02).  It combines a primary FPGA card using the A2F200M3F-FGG484ES device, offering an ARM Cortex-M3, 200,000 gates of logic and 256 Kbytes of flash, along with a motor control daughter card based on TRINAMIC’s dual-control architecture that can manage a stepper motor and brushless DC motor in parallel

While the kit requires two power supplies to operate the two motors in parallel, it comes with a stepper motor with 1.8-degree step angle, and a BLDC motor with Hall sensors, as well as a single portable power supply.  The Microsemi evaluation card includes ports for Ethernet, USB, DMA, I2C, UART, and SPI  The kit includes full A/D and D/A converters, as well as an analog compute engine to ease in mixed-signal design.