Aerotech XL4s voice-coil drive

Aerotech’s XL4s network digital drive is a high-performance linear amplifier designed to drive single-phase motors and eliminate the non-linearities common with PWM amplifiers. The drive provides deterministic behaviour, auto-identification and easy software set-up.

The drive’s multicore, double-precision floating point DSP controls the digital PID. System configuration is performed using all software-settable parameters, including control-loop gains and system safety functions.

The product has an encoder interpolation feature, dedicated analog and digital I/O, and separate power connections for motor and control supply voltages. The packaging allows the unit to be panel mounted in a machine enclosure, resulting in a small machine footprint and requiring little overall floor space.

The device is optimised to control single-phase motors or voice-coil axes like Aerotech’s TLG-4000 fast tool servo. It enables users to achieve good settling times, long-term thermal stability and sub-micron-level tracking accuracy with features such as full state feed-forward, 192 kHz servo rates and look-ahead-based velocity control.

The drive has a high servo rate of 192 kHz. This directly correlates to its ability to track errors and part quality at high speeds in applications such as fast tool servos, high-dynamic optical focusing axes and high-speed pick-and-place machines.