Infineon Technologies AG (FSE: IFX / OTCQX: IFNNY) today announced two shields for the Arduino design community. The shields target two important applications: RGB lighting and motor control.

Both Shields are compatible to Arduino Uno R3 and can be combined with the XMC1100 Boot Kit which is equipped with a 32-bit microcontroller of the XMC1000 family. All XMC1000 products use the ARM® Cortex™-M0 processor. The Infineon RGB LED Lighting Shield for Arduino features the XMC1202 microcontroller with its Brightness Color Control Unit (BCCU) for LED lighting control. The high-current DC Motor Control Shield for Arduino contains the Infineon NovalithIC™ BTN8982TA, an integrated half-bridge driver for motor control.

Arduino is a computing platform with open source hardware and software components enabling a fast and easy way to electronic prototype designs.

Infineon RGB LED Lighting Shield with XMC1202 for Arduino

The RGB LED Lighting Shield from Infineon is an intelligent evaluation board for Arduino. It allows the adoption of different LED light engines to ensure fast prototyping and inexpensive evaluation. The RGB LED Lighting Shield offers three independent output channels for flicker-free control of multicolor LEDs. It is powered by the XMC1202 microcontroller of the XMC1200 series. The series provides all essentials for high-quality color, such as full dimming control and flicker-free light at all dimming levels with low energy consumption. The BCCU automated hardware engine provides a cost sensitive and flexible high-quality LED lighting solution. It is easy-to-configure and ensures smooth dimming and color mixing. The Shield can be expanded by using a DMX interface for lighting and audio nodes or a 24GHz radar sensor for motion detection, for example.

Infineon DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino

The DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino enables the fast and cost-effective prototyping of DC motor control designs with easy testing of half-bridge and full-bridge motor control applications. The Motor Control Shield is capable to drive two uni-directional DC motors or one bi-directional DC motor. The Shield implements two NovalithIC BTN8982TA fully integrated high-current half-bridge drivers optimized for motor drive applications. The NovalithIC BTN8982TA combines in one package three ICs: two power chips (one p-channel high-side MOSFET and one n-channel low-side MOSFET) and an integrated driver IC with one logic circuit to control and monitor the power.

Further feature highlights are diagnosis with current sense, slew rate adjustment, dead time generation and protection against over temperature, undervoltage, overcurrent and short-circuit. Interfacing to a microcontroller is made easy as the NovalithIC BTN8982TA features logic level inputs.

The NovalithIC BTN8982TA provides a cost-optimized solution for protected high-current PWM motor drives with very low board space. The DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino is capable to handle high-frequency PWM of 30kHz, for example. The Shield supports brushed DC motor control up to 250W continuous load (i.e. at 12V / 20A) while the BTN8982TA is having a current limitation which allows peak-currents up to 55A.

Availability

Until end of January 2015, both Shields, the RGB Lighting Shield with XMC1202 for Arduino and the DC Motor Control Shield with BTN8982TA for Arduino, are available for purchase from Farnell element14 and Newark element14, afterwards also from Infineon and its distributors.

Further information

Further information on the new Arduino products from Infineon and the related XMC microcontrollers are available at:
www.infineon.com/arduino
www.infineon.com/xmc
www.infineon.com/xmc-dev