Design of an intelligent stepper motor controller module into a distributed process control architecture

In this paper, the design of an intelligent local actuator module, aimed at controlling up to four stepper motors, is described. The architecture of the module is a three-block architecture, also used for other sensors and/or actuators local modules. For this design the authors have developed a state-of-the-art application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) capable of undertaking the waveform generation and precise timing of the signals for all the motors. Moreover, this module is connected through a fault-tolerant real-time LAN to a distributed control system, being the lowest level (field cell level) in the architecture