TI: You have to work very hard to be a hegemon to look effortless

Industry in TI's eyes

Lu Yuzhao, general manager of sales and applications in TI East China, is not surprised. In his eyes, or in TI's eyes, the industry covers a broader range of fields, with a total of 14 market segments, including factory automation and control, motor drives, building automation, power transmission, medical, test and measurement, etc. He believes that the category of large industrial concepts may be more suitable for TI's appetite. First, because "TI has a comprehensive product system and a wide range of solutions from the system team that can support the development of applications in a wider range of industrial fields." ”； Second, while the industrial market has many different applications and end users, they still have one thing in common: they are all opportunities based on analog and embedded processing innovations.

He has identified factory automation, motor drives, test and measurement, and grid infrastructure as priorities for future industrial development. Because whether it is national grand strategies such as Industry 4.0, Made in China 2025, and artificial intelligence, or subdivided vertical markets such as test and measurement, consumer electronics, and power grid infrastructure, the pursuit of efficiency, intelligence, green and energy conservation is eternal.

"TI wants to give customers something 'modular'." Lu Yuzhao said that Industry 4.0/Made in China 2025 must be implemented through functional modules one by one. Therefore, TI Designs is the tool for the implementation of these modules, and TI's chips are the components of these modules, allowing users to innovate directly based on TI Designs without designing from scratch, which provides customers with better convenience.

For example, in the power protection and transmission and distribution market, most of the industry-leading customers in the early years were in Europe and the United States, but in recent years, it will be found that Chinese companies are guiding and influencing the development of the market, and their demand for higher and higher precision ADCs/DACs is increasing. Unlike the traditional industrial markets in Europe and the United States, the design cycle of Chinese customers is getting shorter and shorter, and the design cycle in some industrial fields is only 3-4 quarters, which means that faster introduction to the market has become a core demand. In other words, if a company can succeed in China, it will be relatively more successful globally.

He believes that what customers really care about is not the functionality of a certain chip, but whether the chip can help them achieve the desired function in the system. This also explains why TI will change its role from providing chip-level solutions to providing system-level solutions, because only by solving customers' system problems can it promote more products; In turn, because of the optimization of the system, it will also put forward higher requirements for products, help promote product research and development, and make products that better meet customer needs. Lu Yuzhao, General Manager of Sales and Application of Texas Instruments (TI) East China

The effort behind the hegemony

The coverage of industrial systems is wide. For a semiconductor chip manufacturer, it is difficult to imagine being able to provide customers with all-round and in-depth services without a complete product line. But this doesn't seem to be a problem for TI, which has more than 100,000 products, including processors, microcontrollers, wireless connectivity, and analog devices. Lu Yuzhao also put more emphasis on TI reference designs.

"TI Designs offers more than just reference designs, but also a full suite of schematics, PCB layouts, and Gerber files. So for customers, they can spend more time on application implementation and product differentiation rather than hardware design. Lu Yuzhao said, "By handing over the hardware-related requirements to TI, we can make these more complete reference designs to customers, which actually saves customers' resources and time." ”

TIDA-00915 is TI's latest GaN power stage reference design, capable of driving 200V AC servo drives and robots with an efficiency of up to 99%, and customers can directly commercialize it with almost no changes. TI believes that the benefits of this reference design are mainly reflected in the following three aspects: 1. The switching frequency is increased, which can optimize the power supply design scheme to the greatest extent and improve efficiency. 2. Higher control accuracy during high-speed operation; 3. GaN devices can optimize switching performance, reduce motor power loss, and reduce the size of the heat sink, thereby saving board footprint. The most powerful thing about it is that it can achieve 99% efficiency at 24kHz PWM in 200-volt motor control; It can also achieve greater than 98% efficiency at 100kHz PWM.

At present, TI not only provides GaN FETs (such as LMG3410 &LMG5200) and GaN drivers with integrated drivers, but also has 13 GaN-related TI Design solutions, mainly used in the field of power transmission, and some are used in household appliances, grid infrastructure and other fields. Related hot research will focus more on high voltages, controllers and related algorithms, power conversion topologies, high-frequency and high-power density passive devices, and gate drivers.

The TIDA-00951, a 2 kilowatt (Kw) isolated bidirectional DC/DC converter reference design for 48V to 400V uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and energy storage systems, is also the most efficient reference in the industry, with a conversion efficiency of more than 94% higher than the industry average. For most traditional designs, when converting between 48V and 400V, two systems are often required to achieve both functions, which means higher costs. The advantage of the TI solution is that the two systems are made into one and achieve bidirectional functionality, thus saving costs. In addition, TI integrates the industry's most efficient current-sensing chip, the INA240, the highest performance enhanced isolation amplifier AMC1301, and the fastest isolation gate driver UCC21520, which ensures performance while making the board space more compact.

In addition to breakthrough innovations, TI is constantly upgrading market-specific products. For example, the recently announced DesignDRIVE Fast Current Loop software makes the C2000 MCU the industry's first device with sub-1 microsecond current loop performance, providing system-on-chip (SOC) functionality and simplifying the development of drive control systems. The new DesignDRIVE fast current loop software is said to outperform traditional MCU-based current loop solutions while simplifying design by eliminating FPGAs typically used for external current loop control.

Lu Yuzhao believes that the industrial upgrading of industry has been going on, such as the upgrading of industrial automation and control, which will bring about the upgrading of testing equipment; After the birth of the iPhone, battery detection required higher accuracy; Smart buildings have brought about an increase in the demand for fingerprint locks, smart bracelets can change medical security and services, and even agriculture needs sensors to sense changes in land for smart irrigation. "Whether in traditional or emerging fields, the speed of the entire iterative innovation is accelerating, but intelligence, energy conservation and customer system cost optimization will be the three directions that no one can avoid."