The massive expansion of the manufacturing industry, combined with the increasing demand for industrial robots and automated technologies to enhance productivity, has widened the potential market for motion control technology. The recent COVID-19 has only accelerated automation in manufacturing facilities to secure employee health & safety. According to surveys, The Motion Control market will be worth $22.8 Billion and grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5.3% by 2022. At the same time, companies that started automating their manufacturing processes are now moving towards adding IoT functionality to create “smart” factory floors as part of the Industry 4.0 concept. When digital information is transformed into precise physical motion, previously infeasible use cases suddenly become possible, driving the 4th Industrial Revolution further: Advanced robotics, the Internet of Things, (battery-powered) medical devices, additive manufacturing, prosthetics, and IIoT, to name just a few. However, efficiently turning digital information into physical motion requires more than just transferring data into movement. Motor control technology must be easy to implement for device developers and easy to use for end consumers. It demands flexible hardware building blocks that support on-demand changes and evolving device capabilities. It requires learning and responding to environment and context, turning repetitive automation into intelligent movement. And it needs to accomplish all of this in increasingly small form factors to handle use cases previously limited by device size requirements.

One company making great strides in the motion control technology space is Trinamic, a part of Analog Devices. Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Trinamic is committed to designing motion control technology in hardware. The company’s journey began when Michael Randt, Founder of TRINAMIC Motion Control, started developing a motion control chip together with his colleagues Lars Larsson and Bernhard Dwersteg. Back in 1996, they often worked with DSPs, and the software was always the bottleneck and a source of problems – the cost of ownership was high. There was simply no hardware solution available, but they knew that designing motion control technology in hardware, not software, was essential for motors that work efficiently, reliably, smoothly, and quietly. This led to the foundation of TRINAMIC Motion Control.

Later, the company was acquired by Maxim-integrated Analog Devices. Trinamic’s motion control expertise and Maxim Integrated’s analogue process technology and power design skills will enable a new class of intelligent actuators.

To further support the rapid development of motion control systems, Trinamic offers extensive guides and tools, making industry-leading motion control as easy as possible

This extends its customers’ ability to deliver intelligence at the edge and achieve the promise of Industry 4.0.

Trinamic’s state-of-the-art ICs, modules, and PANdrive™ smart motors enable today’s software engineers to quickly and reliably develop highly precise drives that are efficient, smooth, and quiet. Their flexible and easy-to-use toolkits make the world’s most influential technology as easy as 1-2-3. The company is proud of its unique culture that unites German precision engineering, the pursuit of perfection, and a hands-on, real-world approach to technology and physical motion. Their long history has taught them to blend proprietary software and hardware components to optimize performance, drive miniaturization, and turnkey motor characteristics into competitive advantages for customers’ devices.

Over the past twenty years, Trinamic has created a broad portfolio of products and solutions that transform digital information into precise and efficient physical motion— ranging from integrated circuits with field-oriented control to custom PCBs and complete PANdrive innovative motor solutions. Nevertheless, they’re never satisfied and regularly add innovative, new motion control products and solutions to their portfolio. Since every Trinamic product is built upon our strong heritage in motors, the company has learned to apply technical solutions based on results, not biases for one technology approach or another.

Trinamic achieves these critical requirements by making the most advanced motion control as easy as 1-2-3. The company’s developer toolkits place decades of motor experience at an engineer’s fingertips. Furthermore, Trinamic productizes its expertise in hardware building blocks to remove complexity and ensure that even device developers without motion control experience can easily optimize motor designs and results, changing the way consumers live and industries work across the globe. By integrating industry-leading motor control technology, Trinamic products form complete, out-of-the-box subsystems.

Trinamic’s collaboration with Andrew Alliance—a part of Waters Corporation, a leading global analytical instrument company—highlights its core competencies

The company launched its first pipetting robot two years later to much acclaim and success. The product won multiple awards over the years and, more importantly, provided lots of data to Andrew Alliance as feedback from users worldwide. It seemed that laboratories around the world were facing challenges concerning productivity and reproducibility. By listening to their customers and understanding their feedback, Andrew Alliance spotted a gap in the market that was needed to drive operational efficiency: the need for a connected lab enabling the automation of the capture and flow of digital data from networked instruments within the lab, enabling more accurate results, reduced costs, greater efficiency, and improved ability to collaborate with other researchers/labs around the world.

Driving the trend of connected lab automation devices and Lab 4.0, the team at Andrew Alliance started developing Andrew+ for single and multi-channel pipetting, determined to deliver a complete ecosystem that increases operational efficiency for cell biology and diagnostics, drug discovery, food testing, or genomics. However, just like their customers, Andrew Alliance wants to focus on their central mission and increase operational efficiency. That’s why they turned towards Trinamic, a trailblazer in the industry.

It took both companies four months to finish three servo drivers based on the Maxon EC 45 flat motor and Trinamic’s reliable building blocks, together with one stepper motor drive using the TMCM-1140 with StallGuard as a safety feature. Together, these drives provide the extremely high accuracy needed for microplates using 8192 steps per motor rotation for accuracy of up to 0.022 degrees. Most importantly, the excellent communication between the companies and the flexible TMCL-IDE saved considerable development time and overhead costs.

Just like motor control changed over the last two decades, so did the average engineer developing the application. Nowadays, the average engineer focuses on what makes their device unique, not creating a seemingly sophisticated drive system. Sleek designs with a minimal form-factor, intuitive user interface, real-time capabilities, functional safety, and collecting and sharing data with the cloud are the new focus of engineers. That’s why intuitive development kits are key. To further support the rapid development of motion control systems, Trinamic offers extensive guides and tools, making industry-leading motion control as easy as possible. Trinamic provides the complete toolbox for customers’ motor and motion control needs. Ranging from application notes, how-to videos, reference designs to frequently asked questions, technical support and software, the comprehensive support tools help them find all the answers they need.