UET motor controller system approved

LAHORE: The efforts of the faculty members, at the Electrical Engineering Department, University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore, in system-on-chip (SoC) design and development have been officially recognised by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS).

According to a press release, the team comprised of Dr Tayyab Mehmood, Dr Muhammad Tahir, Dr Ubaid Ullah Fayyaz, and Umer Shahid. The project titled ‘’Servo Motor Controller SoC (Sermo-SoC)’’ made its way to the Fall 2021 issue of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society’s flagship magazine featuring PICO programme.

The PICO programme is focused on supporting the ramp-up of the open source ecosystem through sponsored IC fabrication runs. The SSCS has purchased ten 130-nm CMOS shuttle seats on Efabless’s chipIgnite programme (see Figure 1). The first four of these seats were dedicated to supporting geographical regions that are underrepresented in IC design. A total of 18 designs were selected from 15 different locations among which Sermo-SoC secured the one shuttle seat out of dedicated four seats which is a matter of national pride.

The Sermo-SoC is a motor controller subsystem that serves as a research vehicle for the design-space exploration of novel motor-control algorithms. It turns the Efabless Caravel SoC into a powerful servo-motor controller that provides four programmable proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control units with quadrature encoder inputs (QEIs) and pulse width modulation (PWM) outputs.

Both the Chisel generator and emitted RTL of Sermo-SoC are open sourced and are showcased at UET’s department of electrical engineering GitHub code bank Vice Chancellor, Prof Dr Syed Mansoor Sarwar, has congratulated all the contributors and stakeholders for the success of this project.