## Friday, July 9, 2021

### GCA 6100C Wafer Stepper Part 2: the stages

The modern wafer scanner is a truck-sized contraption full of magnets, springs, and slabs of granite capable of accelerating at several g's while maintaining single-digit nanometer positioning accuracy. The motion systems contained within painstakingly try to optimize for dynamic performance by using active vibration dampening, voice coils, linear motors, and air bearings, all to increase the value of the machine for its owner (who spent a good fraction of a billion dollars on it).

As it turns out, a 80's stepper is none of these things. Scanners are immensely complex because they are dynamic systems - as the wafer moves in one direction, the reticle moves in the other direction, perfectly synchronized but four times faster. In contrast, steppers are allowed time to settle between steps, which allows for much more leeway in the motion system design. Throughput requirements were also lower; compare the 35 6" wph of an old stepper to the 230 12" wph of a modern scanner.

Old stepper stages are an instructive exercise in the design of a basic precision motion system; in fact, Dr. Trumper used to give this exact stage out as a controls exercise in 2.171. The GCA stages are also particularly interesting from a hardware perspective - they are carefully designed to achieve 40nm positioning accuracy using fairly commodity parts. The only precision parts seem to be the slides for the coarse stage, and even those are ground, not scraped.

The stage architecture

 System overview

GCA steppers use a stacked stage architecture. Coarse positioning is done by two conventional mechanical bearing stages stacked on top of each other. Fine positioning is done by a single two-axis flexure stage. Rotational positioning, which only happens for alignment, is done using a simple open-loop, limited travel stage mounted on the fine stage. Focusing, which is done by changing the Z spacing between the lens and the wafer, is done by moving the optical column up and down with a linkage mechanism.

The position feedback system

The fine position feedback on GCA steppers is implemented through a two-axis HP 5501A heterodyne interferometer. Briefly, a stabilized HeNe laser is Zeeman split through a powerful magnet to create two adjacent lines separated by a few MHz with different polarizations. One of these lines is separated with a polarizing beam splitter and reflected off a moving mirror; this line is Doppler shifted due to the velocity of the moving mirror and beat against the stationary component to generate a signal. This signal is compared against a stationary REF signal to derive velocity and position measurements. Heterodyne interferometers are the preferred choice for metrology due to their insensitivity to ambient effects and power fluctuations.

The 5501A is the de facto choice for interferometric metrology; its successor the 5517 is still available from Keysight. A brief description of the system as found in the GCA steppers follows:

The laser points towards the rear of the stepper; a 10707A beam bender and a 10701A 50% beam splitter generate the two axes of excitation. The X and Y stages have identical measurement assemblies; the Y assembly is located to the rear of the stepper (behind the column) and the X assembly is located inside the laser housing. Both assemblies use a plane-mirror interferometer which differentially measures the wafer position against the optical column; the stationary mirror is a corner cube mounted to the column and the moving mirror is a 6" long dielectric quartz block mirror mounted to the wafer stage. The flats are precision shimmed to ensure orthogonality (since it is the orthogonality of the flats which determines the closed-loop orthogonality of the motion).

There are two additional position sensors in the system. The first is a sensor to measure the position of the fine stage relative to the coarse stage. Literature indicates that this is an LVDT, but on the 6100C it appears to be implemented as two photodiodes outputting a sin/cos type signal. The second is a brushed tachometer on each of the coarse stage drive motors, which is used for loop closure by the stock controller.

The coarse stage

The purpose of the coarse stage is to position the fine stage to within 0.001" of its final position. The stage is built as a pair of stacked plain-bearing stages; these stages are driven by brushed DC motors with brushed tachometers for velocity feedback. The motors go through a right-angle gearbox comprising of a bevel gear and several spur gear stages before being coupled by a flexible coupling to a long drive shaft which turns a pinion positioned near the center of each stage. This pinion drives a brass rack mounted to the stage which generates the final motions.

The fine stage

The fine stage is constructed as a "nested" two-axis flexure stage with a few hundred microns of travel on each axis. The flexures are constructed from discrete parts; the stage is made from cast iron and the flexures themselves are constructed from blue spring steel. Actuation is by moving-coil voice coil motors with samarium-cobalt magnets, and position is read directly from the interferometer system.

The theta stage

The theta stage is a limited travel stage based on a tangent arm design. A (very small) Faulhaber Minimotor is coupled into a high reduction gearbox, which drives a worm gear that turns a segment of a worm wheel. The worm wheel pushes on a linkage which rotates the wafer stage about a pivot point.

Rotation control is entirely open-loop - the wafer is rotated once during the alignment process based on the fiducials observed through the alignment microscopes. A slow open-loop system is acceptable given that the speed of rotational alignment does not significantly affect wafer throughput.

The Z mechanism

The focusing mechanism is a very limited-travel (according literature, about 600um) flexure mechanism. The entire optical column is suspended on two large spring steel plates; a stiff spring counterbalances the weight of the column. A voice coil motor (identical to the fine stage VCMs) actuates a linkage mechanism which moves the column up and down.

Adjusting the mechanism is a bit subtle. The white rod sticking out is actually a tensioning mechanism for the counterbalance; it is possible to aggressively tension the spring to stiffen the assembly for transport. The cap at the end of the rod can be removed to reveal a nut and a piece of threaded rod with a flathead in it. You want to hold the rod in place with a screwdriver and crank on the nut with a wrench until the column just barely 'floats' in place.

Incidentally, this mechanism also reveals a fairly severe weakness of the focusing system - it is extremely undamped. Any disturbances on the column cause the whole assembly to ring like a bell, with the only source of damping being the resistance of the VCM. I think (though there is some information to the contrary) that 6000-series GCA steppers focused once per wafer, relying on wafer leveling to keep the image in resist in focus between fields. Otherwise if the focusing had to be highly dynamic there could be problems.

## Sunday, May 23, 2021

### GCA 6100C Wafer Stepper Part 1: Intro and Maximus 1000 Light Source

 The yellow lights make it look more legitimate

I have always wanted to expose a wafer. I'd written off making my own transistors long ago (nothing that fits in a house is good for feature sizes small enough for interesting logic, and I'm not a good enough analog engineer to design interesting analog), but there are many useful optical and mechanical parts that can be made lithographically.

The usual route to home lithography is a microscope and a DLP, but the resultant ~2mm field sizes are not sufficient for mechanical parts and stitching a 20mm field out of 2mm subfields is very taxing on your motion system. Contact aligners are simple and perform well, but getting submicron resolution for interesting optical parts out of a contact aligner is challenging (the masks also get quite expensive).

The natural solution is to start with a stepper lens (which is basically a giant microscope objective with very bad color correction). There are a few variants - 1:10 lenses with a 10x10mm field, 1:5 lenses with a 14x14mm field, and 1:4 lenses, which weigh several hundred kg and have a 20x20mm field. Stepper lenses also come in several colors: g-line (436nm), i-line (365nm), and DUV (~250nm).

I wound up with a 1:5 g-line lens; the 1:5 lenses strike a good balance between performance and unwieldiness. I also had a set of stages pulled from a DNA sequencer good for a couple microns of resolution. The rough plan was to stack a fine stage on top of these and use a direct-viewing technique to perform alignment. However, the project quickly went south when I realized building an exposure tool entailed buying the parts out of an...exposure tool. Conveniently, a circa 1985 GCA DSW 6100C showed up for more or less scrap value near me, so one rigging operation later I was the proud owner of a genuine submicron stepper.

The DSW family of steppers are true classics; GCA Mann practically invented the commercial stepper in the late 70's. The GCA steppers remained more or less unchanged until the company's demise; everything from the g-line DSW 4800 to the AutoStep 200 shared a stage design, alignment system, and mechanical construction (unfortunately, they also all shared a terrible 70's-grade electronics package!). A number of GCA tools still survive in university fabs, mostly converted to manual operation. Briefly, the design consists of:

• A cast-iron base with a cast-iron 'bridge' holding the optical column.
• A stacked stage consisting of two coarse mechanical bearing stages driven by servomotors, two fine flexure stages constructed as a single unit driven by voice coil actuators, and a open-loop, limited-travel rotation stage driven by DC motors.
• Feedback provided by an HP 5500-series interferometer that meters the displacement between two mirrors mounted to the optical column and two flats mounted to the fine stage.
• A reticle alignment stage consisting of a small flexure actuator and fine-pitch screws for adjustment.
• A focusing system using a photoelectric height sensor and a linkage mechanism that adjusts the entire optical column height (!) with a travel range of around 1mm.
• An alignment system using two fixed microscopes to align the origin and rotation of the wafer.
• A high-pressure mercury arc lamp with a homogenizer and filter (MAXIMUS) to illuminate the reticle with Kohler illumination of the appropriate wavelength.
My copy showed up in an interesting state of disrepair - the laser and alignment microscopes were missing (why anyone would want the alignment microscopes is beyond me), and the Maximus made rattling noises. The first step was to repair the light source.

Inside the Maximus 1000

Life before LEDs was bad. Arc lamps produce a concentrated point of light a few mm across, and turning that into uniform illumination across a 4" reticle is challenging. Now, normal people use a elliptical collector, a condenser lens, and a fly's-eye homogenizer to produce uniform illumination, but not GCA.

Instead, the inside of the Maximus looks like this:

The arc lamp goes in the center; the four identical assemblies each collect 1/4 of the arc lamp output.

The top left is a condenser lens assembly. The diagonal mirror is a cold mirror (it dumps IR into a heatsink not shown); the round filter below it is a narrowband filter for the design wavelength (in this case, 365nm). So far, reasonable. But, where you would usually see a homogenizer after the filter, there is instead a focusing lens. This lens focuses the lamp output into four fiber lightguides, which bundle into a single lightguide on the other end. The output of this lightguide is then imaged onto the reticle in the usual fashion by a illumination lens. This arrangement, while very complex, has a neat benefit: the characteristics of the illumination are solely determined by the light guide. The NA of the fibers sets the illumination field size, and the diameter of the output bundle determines the NA of the illumination. The illumination is perfectly uniform, since every fiber perfectly illuminates the whole field; missing fibers will only result in a slight overall loss of intensity.

As luck would have it, practically every screw in the Maximus was loose, and the bulb was snapped in half. The rebuild took a couple hours, and was greatly improved by removing the head from the stepper - dealing with loose lenses is much easier when you are not six feet off the ground (if by some chance you are reading this and also servicing a GCA stepper, removing the Maximus is easy - just pull the four socket head screws at the base of the condenser, un-route the shutter cables and lamp cables, and the unit lifts right off).

I haven't had a chance to check performance yet, as the bulb needs replacement. The Maximus uses Ushio USH-350DP bulbs. Of critical note: the USH-350DP is a two-screw-terminal designed for aligners. The Maximus uses a screw-on "bullet" on one end to convert it to a plug-in type; if you are changing bulbs, don't throw out the plug!

• Here is a collection of various official GCA manuals scraped off the internet, mostly from university sites. The information in the manuals is helpful for understanding how the system works. If you are intent on actually using the stock GCA controller, the manuals are pretty much mandatory, since the PDP-based software is not very user friendly.
• Here are various pieces of documentation from third parties (once again, mostly academic fabs). Additionally, there are several good DSW guides:

## Sunday, October 11, 2020

### The K39 mini-ITX case

Intro: the tiny and elusive K39

The K39 is the worlds' smallest case with discrete GPU support. No one really knows where it came from; there are several K39 variants listed on Chinese shopping site Taobao. There's even one listed on Amazon, with Prime shipping to boot, but at $148 with no PSU, it's of questionable value.  K39 specifications The K39 is an odd case; it throws away…every feature…to achieve its small size. It has no drive bays, no external ports, and of course no lighting. Instead, it relies on onboard storage and rear I/O ports (though it is worth noting there are obscure K39 variants with a single USB port and a single 3.5mm jack). However, it is incredibly small - at 3.9 to 4.5L depending on the variant, it is even smaller than the 5.0L NFC SkyReach 4 Mini. Like the S4 Mini, it is limited to short (180mm) video cards. It also supports standard flex-ATX PSUs, though there are many caveats... The K39 power supply While the K39 can mount generic flex-ATX PSUs, it is, for all intents and purposes, a case with a built-in PSU. The K39 PSUs are very cheap 80Plus Gold rated units, built from recycled server parts. In order to make the PSU more compact, the stock cable harnesses are cut short and soldered into a modular breakout board. Innovatively, the PSU uses thin, high-temperature silicone wire, which is both flexible and capable of carrying high currents. Due to cable routing restrictions, the modular cables are more or less essential for operation. While it is possible to buy a K39 with no power supply, there isn't really a reason to do so. The modular supplies cost much less than the competition, and are available up to 600W, which is much more than the case can dissipate. The build The actual computer inside this case is strange and sort of terrible. It uses a long-discontinued ASRock X99 board, a 120W 14-core Xeon, and an R9 Nano. The ASRock board has gained some sort of strange cult following and costs as much now as it did new (or maybe there are a ton of people who need 128GB on an ITX board?). The Xeons are very cheap, but not very fast, with any cost savings over a Ryzen 4000 CPU immediately nulled by high motherboard prices. The Nano was never very good, it performs somewhere between a 1060 6GB and a 1070, but is crippled by its 4GB of VRAM. A dubious perk is that it is almost the fastest short card supported by macOS; the AXRX 5700 ITX can only be imported from China for a huge amount of money. However, the components serve their purpose as being a maximum challenge testbed for the build. The X99e-ITX/ac is a very hard board to build around, especially with a 47mm cooler restriction. My previous thin X99 build had an 83mm clearance which was still quite difficult to work with - it required a discontinued Cooler Master cooler, custom waterjet stainless brackets, and a machined-down 120mm fan. The Nano's TDP is also at the top end of short cards; the other contenders (the 1070, RX 5700, and 2070) have similar ratings. Build notes There's surprisingly little to say here. The K39 variants are all a little awkward to work with because they require a complete disassembly for component installation. On this flavor, the front panel comes off to reveal a freestanding motherboard tray. The I/O shield pops into the outer shell, then the tray with installed motherboard and riser slides in. The PSU and PSU cables go in next, followed by wiring, the GPU, and finally the front panel. This is where the super-flexible PSU cables come in handy; it would be impossible to route normal cables in the case. The standard PSUs actually have a SATA power connector on them, but there is no room in the case for a 2.5" drive. My understanding is that folks who have 2.5" drives in the case use foam tape to affix them to one of the side panels. Cooling I was targeting a laptop-like acoustic profile on this build; that is, quiet when idle and loud and hot under load. I had originally wanted to use a 1U Dynatron vapor chamber active cooler. Unfortunately, the Dynatron was more or less unusable; it ran extremely hot (60C! at idle) and was amazingly loud. Even with a 50mV undervolt and a custom fan curve that ran minimum speed until 75C, the blower would randomly spool up with even one core active. It was clear that some more "engineering" was needed. Fortunately, 47mm just barely clears a 1U passive cooler (29mm) with a 15mm thick fan stacked on top. To find a fan, I took to the trusty old technique of disassembling stock coolers; stock coolers are often laughed at, but to get sufficient cooling performance out of a small, cheap heatsink requires a serious fan. I ended up using a 70mm, 8.4W fan out of an FM2+ stock cooler: The fan required a bit of minor machining (it had mounting feet that put it over the height limit). Some brackets were drawn up and printed… …and the whole thing was put together with some screws and 3M VHB tape. The small 40mm fan is critical; without it, the CPU would cook the SSD enough to severely throttle, meaning a lengthy cooldown period was necessary after heavy loads. It also cools the PCH by about 15C, which is not too bad for such an anemic fan. The cooler bolts into place neatly, and the VHB seems to handle the high temperatures just fine. Performance We'll start with the bad news: the 2683 v3 is no longer fast. It does score a healthy 180 fps on KeyShot, but that's merely the performance of a 9900K, a CPU with six fewer cores. On the other hand, it does perform like a$350 CPU for $120, so if rendering is all you do it's not a bad choice. There are a couple ways to tweak performance. An X99 + Xeon specific is to undervolt the CPU by 50mV. Furthermore, most boards allow custom-tweaked fan curves: This is pretty necessary with a small, noisy fan; most boards idle too high by default. With a tweaked fan curve and small undervolt, the CPU idles at a slightly-warm-but-not-concerning 50C: And a fairly nominal 66W: Load is much more interesting. Most boards have some manner of power tuning available. On this particular board, the electrical design current (EDC) was settable, but unfortunately, the limit did not seem to correspond to actual amps. Thankfully, it was monotonic...setting an EDC of 80 resulted in a load power consumption of about 180W: Delta-over-idle of 114W corresponded to an all-core speed of 2.3GHz and a load temperature of 78C. Importantly, neither the SSD nor the DIMMs overheated, though the memory does get quite warm: Removing the current limit results in 200W even of power consumption, representing a 134W delta-over-idle. At this point, the fans get really loud, but temperatures are still in control: The RAM is now looking uncomfortably hot - some heatspreaders might be warranted... Conclusion We learned today that it is possible to dissipate 135W with a 47mm cooler. We also learned the importance of ambient airflow - the 40mm fan doesn't move much air, but was absolutely critical for success. In addition, we learned that Haswell Xeons have underwhelming performance in 2020, though for the price they are pretty solid. Fortunately, a lot of this is still applicable to the upcoming Ryzen 5000 CPUs; 135W is perfect for getting stock performance out of a 105W Ryzen 5000. True masochists might also consider the EPC621D4I; with careful tuning, a 28-core Xeon Platinum may be possible. ## Saturday, April 25, 2020 ### Cambridge Technology 6230H galvo short teardown Cambridge Technology's galvos are popular as the de facto high performance galvonometer scanner. The highest performing models are moving magnet scanners; these are conceptually similar to a single phase brushless motor. However, in galvo duty the rotor never completes a revolution, instead scanning back and forth with a maximum range of around 40 mechanical degrees (+/- 20 degrees). This range is small enough that rotor position is not part of the torque generation loop (and in fact, with a single set of coils, it is impossible to control the stator current phase); instead, galvos operate as current-amplitude-to-torque converters. The galvo in this teardown is a 6230H, a mid-sized model still in production. The rotor (second from the left, bottom row) is a radially magnetized, single-piece sintered neodymium magnet with a very long aspect ratio. This aspect ratio maximizes the torque-to-inertia of the rotor - torque scales as LR*R = LR^2, whereas rotor inertia scales as MR^2 = LR^2*R^2 = LR^4, so torque-to-inertia falls off as R^2. I'm not sure why further optimizations weren't made to the shaft, for example, a hollow shaft and/or a shaft made of an exotic alloy would have reduced inertia further, and the CT galvos are not particularly cost-sensitive products. The stator (top left) is epoxied into the galvo housing with (hopefully thermally conductive) epoxy. To avoid saturation, the stator is a complex air-cored winding, similar to what is found in high performance servomotors. Not having stator iron has the added benefit of greatly reducing stator inductance, which could limit the electrical step response of the system. A coreless stator means the short-term current of the system is only limited by the fusing of the stator windings, and, in practice, by demagnetization of the rotor PM's due to off-axis current at the ends of travel (since the stator field does not rotate to stay in sync with the rotor field). The real voodoo in the Cambridge galvos is the position sensor, consisting of the quadrature photodiode assembly in the bottom left. This is used in conjunction with the IR illuminator (bottom row, third from the left) to measure the rotor position with impressive accuracy. 8uRad short term repeatability equates 16b+ of angle data over 40 degrees of travel, and a linearity of 99.9% open loop is very nearly 10 bits with no additional calibration. Overall, no surprises - this is a state of the art galvo and the design and construction show it. The motor part is nothing fancy (I'm sure you could copy it with a little help from China), but the position sensor would require quite the R&D to duplicate, especially since the little photodiode "slices" look like custom parts. ## Saturday, December 7, 2019 ### Extended Schmidt-Cassegrain Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescopes (SCT's) are incredibly cheap on the secondhand market - 8" OTA's are around$350, 10" (Meade)/11" (Celestron) OTA's under $1000, and even the mighty C14 can be had for under$2000 on good day. Compared to, say, an Ritchey-Chretien telescope (a Cassegrain with a hyperbolic primary) this is an incredible deal - a generic 10" GSO RC sells for about $2500 new and is rarely available on the used market. These low prices are largely due to decades of experience in mass production combined with huge volumes for the visual market. Unfortunately, if you're interested in photographic rather than visual use, SCT's have traditionally been a questionable choice. SCT's are only corrected on-axis; off axis, they suffer from both coma and field curvature - very severe field curvature at that, thanks to the folded design. Now, RC's (and their relative, the Meade ACF telescopes) are really not that better - they are coma-free, but they replace coma with severe astigmatism and still suffer from field curvature. Despite the generally poor reputation, the SCT design has a key merit - it uses spherical mirrors. A spherical mirror with a stop placed at the center of curvature has just two aberrations: spherical and coma. This is because the mirror "looks the same" from the point of view of every field angle, so all of the asymmetric aberrations are inherently absent. The Schmidt corrector on an SCT corrects for spherical aberration, which means the only remaining aberration is field curvature, right? Obviously not, because SCT's are full of coma. This is because the corrector (stop) on a commercial SCT is intentionally moved closer than one radius to the primary in order to shorten the overall length of the system and improve handling. This results in performance like so: Performance is poor - at the corners of a full-frame field (21mm, about 1 degree), RMS spot sizes reach 108 microns, and this system has virtually no contrast past 10LP/mm (Nyquist for 25um pixels) in the corners. However, let's move the corrector out to ~660mm from the primary, and add a single concave lens. Performance now looks like this: Performance is pretty decent, with 21 micron RMS spots in the corners at best average focus, greatly reduced coma, and good contrast even at 50 lp/mm. The weakly diverging lens (130mm radius of curvature, e.g. Newport KPC067) in front of the image plane serves to cancel out the inherent field curvature of the system and substantially improves performance. It also extends the focal length slightly (from 2500mm to 3000mm), which is not great unless your camera has a KAF-1001E or similar large-pixel sensor. It has the additional disadvantage of adding some chromatic aberration, as it is a singlet with nonzero net optical power - for one-shot color imaging it might be best to just leave it out and accept the field curvature. For narrowband (or even LRGB) imaging, just refocus for each wavelength and it should work fine. The verdict: yes, it does work. The only other option for correcting an SCT is the Starizona SCT corrector, which is a great product; however, at$599 for the full-frame version it only makes sense on one of the larger instruments. This scheme is obviously more labor intensive - actually implementing it is closer to "build a new telescope using the glass from a commercial SCT" than "modifying a commercially available telescope". Your best bet if you actually build this would be a secondhand C8 ($300), a Chinese focuser ($100) and an a7S ($600 used), a combination which gives a well-corrected ~1 degree field of view. ## Wednesday, March 6, 2019 ### Freefly Systems ARC200 teardown Most motor controllers are bad. They range from not really doing motor control (any hobby controller, eBike controllers) to being electrically questionable (small VESCs) or having flaky (SimonK and BLHeli, which in addition, don't do real motor control) or confusing (Sevcon) firmware, to being mechanically questionable (most 'servo drives'). On the surface, the ARC200 doesn't really distinguish itself; nominally, a '200A 48V inverter with FOC' isn't much different from any of the large VESC variants out there. However, none of the big VESCs are great (questionable layout, too much electrolytic capacitance, terrible connector choices, too expensive), and the ARC200 sits at a comfortable price point above the bad Chinese controllers but well below the VESCs and industrial servo drives. In addition, I am good friends with several engineers at Freefly, and had high hopes that their involvement in the product would make it not bad. What Makes a Motor Controller? When most people evaluate a motor controller, they immediately jump to the power stage. However, the power stage is but a small part of the system, and with power MOSFETs getting cheaper and better, device selection and layout are becoming less and less critical. All DC-operated inverters share the following equally important building blocks: Microcontroller and firmware: You can't really screw up the implementation of a microprocessor, but boy is it possible to screw up an implementation of FOC. The core algorithms are probably right (you quickly notice swapped variables or extra factors of -1), but managing the rest of the state machine is much harder. Startup conditions, integral windup, throttle bounds, and interrupt priority are a few of the many ways to go wrong. The firmware is probably the hardest to test, as some edge operating conditions are difficult to trigger on the bench. On the other hand, writing good motor control firmware is no different from writing any other kind of software, but most hardware engineers (and many software engineers!) don't have formal training in writing robust code. Low voltage power supply (LVPS): The LVPS is a DC-DC converter that takes the DC link voltage and generates the 12-15V and 3.3-5V rails to power the gate drive and logic, respectively. The LVPS is a somewhat tricky part to design; typically, it is built using an off-the-shelf SMPS controller IC. Commercial SMPS controllers are "black boxes" that usually expect relatively clean DC input and a slow load. Inverter applications, in contrast, are very noisy, since the DC link is full of transients from the power stage. Cheaper or very low-voltage controllers will usually run the logic off a LDO, possibly with a resistor in series. This suffers from a similar problem; in fact, an unfiltered LDO is guaranteed to pass input transients to the output, as no linear regulator is capable of handling sub-microsecond input changes. LVPS failures will usually take out the entire inverter, since the failing logic and gate drive rails will put the entire control stage in an invalid state for several milliseconds, leading to desaturation or shoot-through of the power stage. In addition, failure of the LVPS to regulate (due to an input transient) will often damage the control stage by passing the transient to the output. Isolation and gate drive: The gate drivers turn the power MOSFETs on and off. There are various levels of sophistication; the dumbest gate drivers are just a pair of complementary BJTs, the smartest ones integrate capacitive isolation, desat detection, and fault signaling. Closely related is how the gate drives are powered. Most low-voltage controllers power all six off a single 12 or 15V rail, and use bootstrap capacitors and diodes to generate the high-side voltages. This adds the obvious benefit of simplicity, but makes layout a little tricky (the 12V rail has to fan out to all six gate drives) and has the rather large disadvantage of connecting the logic and power grounds. Circulating ground currents can then potentially upset the microcontroller and LVPS. In contrast, high voltage inverters always fully isolate the gate drives, for safety reasons. This has the neat benefit of completely separating the control and power grounds (indeed, most 300V+ controllers require a separate low voltage power supply as input), but adds a ton of complexity. I/O: Control inputs are dangerous, because they often run over a long wire. Small controllers rarely isolate their inputs, which means analog and serial control cables contain a wire directly connected to the ground of the microcontroller. Needless to say, attaching a large antenna to logic ground and having it pick up every switching transient in the system often leads to poor performance. Industrial servo drives almost universally have optically isolated inputs. In this case, the control signal drives the LED in an optoisolator, removing the need to bring logic ground out of the controller. Annoyingly, most hobby controllers marketed as 'opto' don't actually have optoisolated inputs; 'opto' in this case only means that the controller does not provide a 5V accessory power supply. Power stage: And now, we finally get to the power stage. The choice of power device is practically a non-issue in this day and age, but layout still requires some consideration, especially in small controllers (where cost and compactness considerations sometimes lead to electrical compromises). In particular, very high-current, low-voltage controllers have trouble finding space for enough copper to carry the full phase current, and sometimes run into package current limitations as well. Surprisingly enough, high-voltage inverters are much easier to lay out. The smaller ones (400V, up to ~50A) are covered by fully integrated 'smart power modules', and the larger ones (up to ~300A) are covered by sixpack IGBT modules (which contain 3 half bridges sharing a DC link, but no gate drive). Selecting capacitors is also somewhat of a black art. Electrolytic capacitors are mostly resistors at high frequencies, and a poor implementation of an electrolytic DC link capacitor can be worse than nothing (the energy stored helps blow up the devices in case of a failure). On the other hand, insufficient DC link capacitance leads to high ripple current in the DC link cables (which could be long, and therefore potential sources of EMI) and high voltage transients (switching spikes aside, the average DC link voltage + half the peak to peak ripple needs to remain under the voltage rating of the devices). For large high-voltage inverters, the cost and weight of the capacitors is often equal to that of the switching devices. Electromechanical components: Connector selection is a matter of taste and application. The automotive and aerospace industries have stringent isolation, water-resistance, and even coloration requirements. An inverter for an OEM robotics application might value weight and compactness over waterproofing, and an industrial controller would use common connectors found in automation. There are clear wrong choices (pin headers come to mind), but never a single "best" connector. The same goes for housings and thermal management. The Actual Teardown Phew, that was a lot of intro. This teardown has an associated Flickr album containing high-res images, because nothing sucks more than not being able to see the part number on an IC. For convenience, some of the images will be reproduced here, but are limited to Blogger's 1600x1200 resolution. Overview, Microcontroller, and LVPS The ARC200 is constructed as a two-board stack; the top board contains the LVPS, microcontroller, and additional logic, and the bottom board carries the power devices, gate drive, and capacitors. The microprocessor is an STM32F746NGH6, which is a serious part that costs almost$12 in quantity. For better or for worse, this is the largest microcontroller I have seen in a motor control application (it beats out the F446RE in my own designs). In addition, the microcontroller is connected to a 512MB SPI Flash, so there is plenty of room for expansion and future features if so desired. The main logic rail is generated by a LM5116, which is a 100V-capable buck controller IC.

Visible towards the right (near the I/O connectors) are a MCP2562 CAN transceiver, a LMV612 dual op-amp, and a TLP2361 dual optocoupler. The CAN transceiver's purpose is obvious (though it is worth noting CAN is not included in the available external interfaces), the LMV612 probably serves to buffer analog throttle and the TLP2361 probably buffers various forms of digital throttle. Also visible are some small DIP switches, which probably shouldn't be flipped.

The backside of the logic board reveals several additional components. A number of LMV612's likely provide additional analog functionality. To the left, a TPS542941 buck regulator generates the 5 and 3.3 V rails, augmented by a healthy number of ceramic capacitors. To the right, the capacitors and MOSFETs (low side, high side) for the LVPS are visible - the LM5116 does not integrate switches. A diode likely provides reverse polarity protection. On the upper right, there is an ST M24128 - a somewhat strange choice given the amount of FLASH available on the F7, but perhaps it saves flash wear?

On the bottom left, a tiny Rigado BMD-350 provides BLE connectivity. This is a trick to avoid having to FCC certify the 2.4GHz part of the controller, as well as making layout easier (implementing RF SoC's can be tricky).

Also visible all around the board are the short board stacking headers that connect the logic deck to the bottom board.

Gate Drives

The gate drive uses a standard bootstrapped design with some twists. Because level-shifted gate drive IC's top out at 4A (and even those are somewhat fragile) and fully isolated drives are very expensive, the gate drive stage uses FAN3122 9A discrete drivers, bootstrap diodes, and Silabs SI8620BB digital isolators. In addition to providing high-side control, the isolators serve to somewhat protect the microcontroller from transients in the power stage. A column of tiny linear regulators powers the isolators.

A number of diodes provide various functionalities including bootstrapping, turn-on/turn-off time separation, and gate protection.

Also visible here are the DC link capacitors, six 180uF 63V parts. The lack of ceramic capacitors is disappointing, but realistically, at the RMS currents the ARC200 targets, 100V/200uF of ceramics would have been required, an expensive proposition at any time and especially now during the ceramic capacitor shortage.

Power Stage

The power stage uses four TPH2R608NH devices per switch. These are very economically priced parts, only 67 cents in full reel quantity for a 75V 2 mohm FET with reasonable gate charge. In fact, they are cheap enough that to the right, three more of them are used to provide anti-spark functionality. Current sensing is done with three (!?) huge 250uohm shunts. Appearances are deceiving; the SOIC device next to each shunt is not a shunt amplifier, but rather another SI8620BB. Instead, current sense amplification is likely implemented using several of the many LMV612's on the logic deck.

Mechanical Design

The thermal path to the case is provided by several thick thermal pads. Heatsinking of the power stage is done entirely through the top of the packages; this is often worse than through vias in the board, but allows for more design flexibility (and the Toshiba FETs in particular have pretty thin top epoxy). The springs in the top image are used to keep the logic board pressed down against the power board, which could have implications for reliability in high-g applications. Silicone sealing is visible along the entire seam of the enclosure (the nature of this sealing means once an ARC200 is disassembled, it will be difficult to waterproof it again).