Refrigerators and freezers

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Optimized motor control solutions for compressor efficiency

Achieving superior energy efficiency in smart refrigerators and freezers hinges on advanced motor inverter drive and compressor motor control designs. Infineon's comprehensive range of solutions and expertise empower you to overcome design challenges with cutting-edge technologies.

  • Optimized solutions for refrigeration – High light load efficiency and ESD Immunity: The CoolMOS™ 8 and PFD7 families of MOSFETs are engineered to reduce energy consumption, drastically increased energy efficiency compared to other solutions, and therefore enhancing system durability in refrigerators and freezers. For integrated and small form-factors designs, the CIPOS™ Micro family of Intelligent Power Modules (IPMs) offers various footprints and robust humidity resistance, ideal for harsh environments.
  • Reliable performance for refrigerators and freezers – Full load operations: In refrigeration, the 600 V Reverse Conducting Drive 2 (RC-D2) family of IGBTs minimizes electromagnetic interference (EMI), ensures reliable performance under heavy loads, and an excellent price-performance ratio. Alternatively, the CIPOS™ Mini family of IPMs features high integration and rugged Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) gate driver technology.
  • Innovative designs for compact solutions – heatsink-less designs: The CoolGaN™ Drive family of integrated gallium nitride (GaN) transistors with intelligent gate drivers and current sense enables compact and cost-effective designs, making them great choice for refrigerator compressor motors.
  • Precise control with reliable gate drivers – inverter motor drives: Ensure precise control and robustness in your inverter motor drive applications with Infineon's compact and reliable level-shift EiceDRIVER™ gate drivers. Leveraging Infineon's innovation leads to heightened energy efficiency, reliability, and performance in motor drive applications.

Comprehensive microcontroller solutions for motor control: Infineon offers a wide range of microcontrollers, the core of any motor control design, to meet diverse requirements:

  • Cost-effective motor control: The XMC1300/1400 MCU family, based on the Arm® Cortex®-M0, is ideal for controlling single compressor motors on a budget. Features include easy 3-phase inverter implementation with a single CCU8 PWM unit, shadow register transfer, external input for fault control, a binary and floating pre-scaler, 16-bit to 64-bit bandwidth, and a motor control-specific MATH co-processor. On the other hand, if you are looking for flexible software development, the PSOC™ 4 family of MCUs includes custom motor control code development and intelligent algorithms. These features improve power factor by decreasing high-order harmonics, and support meeting energy labeling requirements.
  • High-performance motor control: The PSOC™ Control C3 line of MCUs, based on Arm® Cortex®-M33, focuses on single motor plus Power Factor Correction (PFC) designs. It boasts low power modes, idle sampling, high resolution versatile timers, and a CORDIC accelerator. Additional features include 128-bit Flash-read, 16 kB I-Cache, "Protection Context" flash partitioning, and accompanying code examples and development tools in the ModusToolbox™ Motor Suite software.
Cutting-Edge Human-Machine Interface (HMI) Designs for Modern Appliances

Developing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) for smart refrigerators and freezers involves addressing challenges such as ensuring interaction reliability, robustness, and liquid tolerance to provide an optimal user experience (UX). Infineon's tailored solutions effectively meet these needs, offering significant benefits for your projects. 

  • Enhance responsiveness and reliability with CAPSENSE™ Technology: Infineon's MCUs equipped with fifth-generation CAPSENSE™ touch-sensing technology enable highly responsive and reliable HMI designs. This technology ensures that smart appliance interfaces function flawlessly, even in challenging environments, due to its high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
  • Achieve energy efficiency with ultra-low power operation: Develop products with lower energy consumption, thanks to CAPSENSE™'s ultra-low standby current and always-on sensing capabilities. This feature is particularly beneficial for battery-powered devices, extending their operational life.
  • Leverage advanced features such as liquid immunity and multi-sensing: The PSOC™ 4 and PSOC™ 6 MCU families, integrated with CAPSENSE™ technology, offer liquid immunity and presence detection for screen wake-up capabilities. Enhane further the intuitive your customers’ user experience.
  • Integrate AI/ML capabilities with PSOC™ Edge MCUs: The forthcoming PSOC™ Edge MCUs further enhance system efficiency by offloading complex tasks through AI and machine learning capabilities. They enable features such as always-on audio for voice control, multi-modal presence detection, and gesture control, pushing the boundaries of smart appliance interaction.
  • Streamline development with ModusToolbox™ Ecosystems: Both MCU families utilize this development ecosystem, providing a flexible and comprehensive HMI display control development experience, allowing for quicker and more efficient project completion.

 

Advanced Sensor Technologies Enhancing Smart Appliance Functionality

Modern refrigerators have evolved into truly "smart" IoT appliances, equipped with a variety of sensors that gather contextual information to optimize performance and user experience. Infineon's XENSIV™ sensor portfolio offers comprehensive solutions for these applications.

  • Presence detection and gesture control: Utilize XENSIV™ 60GHz radar sensors to detect presence near the refrigerator, measure distance, sense gestures, monitor liquid levels, and even detect falls.
  • Voice control enablement: Integrate XENSIV™ MEMS microphones to facilitate voice-controlled interfaces, enhancing user interaction with the appliance.
  • Energy efficiency enhancement: Employ XENSIV™ 3D magnetic and pressure sensors to monitor door status, ensuring doors are closed properly and thereby increasing energy efficiency.
  • Food freshness monitoring: Implement XENSIV™ PAS CO2 sensors to measure changes in pressure levels or CO2 concentrations to enable food freshness detection within the refrigerator.

To streamline the integration of these advanced sensor solutions into your next smart refrigerator or freezer design, Infineon provides a comprehensive portfolio of reference designs, demo boards, evaluation boards, and software solutions. These resources simplify the design process, enabling you to develop innovative and efficient appliances with ease.

 

Secure Wireless Connectivity for IoT-Enabled Refrigeration and freezing Systems

Integrating Wi-Fi connectivity into intelligent refrigerators and freezers offers numerous benefits but also raises concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy. Infineon addresses these challenges by providing robust connectivity and security solutions tailored for the IoT and smart home era.

Benefits of a connected refrigerator enabled by Infineon's AIROC™ Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi modules, which include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® chips, combo solutions, and connected microcontrollers:

  • Enhanced energy efficiency: Remotely monitor and manage your appliance to ensure optimal performance, e.g. open-door check
  • Intelligent inventory management: Utilize AI/ML-enabled microcontrollers, such as the PSOC™ Edge, to analyze food quantities and automatically reorder depleted items.
  • Smartphone integration: Connect with smartphones for calendar reminders, video calls, and more, enhancing user convenience.

To safeguard these connected smart home appliances, Infineon's OPTIGA™ Trust M and OPTIGA™ Trust M MTR products offer secured integration with other smart devices. These solutions provide up to ten times faster connection to the cloud compared to software-only approaches and offer flexibility with quick and easy access to any cloud provider, thanks to pre-personalized certificates. OPTIGA™ Trust M MTR is Matter-certified and works with any MCU/SoC, making it easy to add secured Matter compatibility to existing IoT designs.

Energy-Efficient Power Supply Solutions for Smart Refrigerators

Modern smart refrigerators and freezers require increasing power to drive advanced features such as larger touch screen displays. Infineon’s CoolSET™ power supply ICs enable this higher power delivery while remaining energy efficient. Enhancing energy efficiency is crucial for meeting decarbonization goals and adhering to energy rating standards such as U.S. Energy Star, EU IEC 62552, and China's GB 12021.2-2015. Infineon's auxiliary AC-DC Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS) solutions complement optimized motor control and ultra-low power HMI technologies to achieve higher energy efficiency ratings.

  • Efficient power conversion and flexibility
  • Discrete solutions: Utilize discrete CoolSET™ PWM flyback ICs in conjunction with user-friendly CoolMOS™ P7 superjunction (SJ) MOSFETs to ensure design flexibility and high efficiency.
  • Integrated solutions: Reduce Bill of Materials (BOM) cost, space, and development time with CoolSET™ AC-DC Integrated Power Stages (IPS). These solutions enable scalable platform designs, accommodating various power requirements through quasi-resonant or fixed-frequency families. All integrated CoolSET™ families feature low standby power consumption, cost-effectiveness, high ambient temperature tolerance, and power delivery up to 43 W.
  • Alternatively, the CoolSET™ SiP family integrates an 800 V P7 CoolMOS™, a ZVS primary controller, and a secondary SR controller using CT Link technology for isolated communication, enabling up to 60 W power delivery in a compact SMD package. This ZVS flyback solution reduces BOM cost and switching losses, improves EMI performance, and achieves over 94% efficiency, making it ideal for auxiliary power supply in refrigerators and freezers.

Evaluate Infineon's industry-leading solutions with our selection of evaluation boards and leverage our simulation tool, PowerEsim, to streamline your design process.

Comprehensive main system solutions for intelligent refrigeration and freezing

The main control system is pivotal in enabling the intelligent features and energy efficiency of modern smart refrigerators and freezers. Serving as the central hub, it manages and coordinates all appliance functions. Infineon's extensive portfolio of MCUs offers tailored solutions for various control requirements, ensuring optimal performance across basic, mid-range, and high-end applications:

  • Cost-effective control with PSOC™ 4 MCU Family based on the Arm® Cortex®-M0 core features programmable analog and digital blocks, a broad range of general and application-specific products, a unified software framework, and the capability to integrate inductive or capacitive sensing.
  • More performance at a great price-performance ratio. Infineon’s PSOC™ Control C3 family of MCUs based on Arm® Cortex®-M33 are WBG-ready and feature real-time control with high-performance 12-bit 12-MSPS SAR ADC, built-in 16-channel sample-and-hold functions, and a feature-rich timer/counter/PWM (TCPWM) block.
  • Advanced IoT capabilities with PSOC™ 6 MCU family: For applications requiring a highly configurable MCU specialized for IoT use cases, the PSOC™ 6 MCU family is an ideal choice. Based on a dual-core architecture featuring Arm® Cortex®-M4 and Cortex®-M0+ cores, this family offers a flexible and high-performance solution. It supports software-defined peripherals, making it suitable for tasks such as Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) communication, input/output data control, and sensor aggregation.
  • Edge AI/ML implementation with PSOC™ Edge: For implementing Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the PSOC™ Edge Fully Integrated MCU SoC family, based on Arm® Cortex®-M55/M33 cores, offers a high-performance and low-power compute platform. This family enables developers to accelerate development with a richer set of capabilities at lower system power and cost. It facilitates AI/ML processing at the edge, addressing privacy, data bandwidth, reliability, and latency concerns typically associated with cloud-based AI/ML processing.

By selecting the appropriate Infineon MCU family, you can optimize the main control system of your smart refrigerator or freezer, enhancing both intelligent functionality and energy efficiency.

Optimized motor control solutions for compressor efficiency

Achieving superior energy efficiency in smart refrigerators and freezers hinges on advanced motor inverter drive and compressor motor control designs. Infineon's comprehensive range of solutions and expertise empower you to overcome design challenges with cutting-edge technologies.

  • Optimized solutions for refrigeration – High light load efficiency and ESD Immunity: The CoolMOS™ 8 and PFD7 families of MOSFETs are engineered to reduce energy consumption, drastically increased energy efficiency compared to other solutions, and therefore enhancing system durability in refrigerators and freezers. For integrated and small form-factors designs, the CIPOS™ Micro family of Intelligent Power Modules (IPMs) offers various footprints and robust humidity resistance, ideal for harsh environments.
  • Reliable performance for refrigerators and freezers – Full load operations: In refrigeration, the 600 V Reverse Conducting Drive 2 (RC-D2) family of IGBTs minimizes electromagnetic interference (EMI), ensures reliable performance under heavy loads, and an excellent price-performance ratio. Alternatively, the CIPOS™ Mini family of IPMs features high integration and rugged Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) gate driver technology.
  • Innovative designs for compact solutions – heatsink-less designs: The CoolGaN™ Drive family of integrated gallium nitride (GaN) transistors with intelligent gate drivers and current sense enables compact and cost-effective designs, making them great choice for refrigerator compressor motors.
  • Precise control with reliable gate drivers – inverter motor drives: Ensure precise control and robustness in your inverter motor drive applications with Infineon's compact and reliable level-shift EiceDRIVER™ gate drivers. Leveraging Infineon's innovation leads to heightened energy efficiency, reliability, and performance in motor drive applications.

Comprehensive microcontroller solutions for motor control: Infineon offers a wide range of microcontrollers, the core of any motor control design, to meet diverse requirements:

  • Cost-effective motor control: The XMC1300/1400 MCU family, based on the Arm® Cortex®-M0, is ideal for controlling single compressor motors on a budget. Features include easy 3-phase inverter implementation with a single CCU8 PWM unit, shadow register transfer, external input for fault control, a binary and floating pre-scaler, 16-bit to 64-bit bandwidth, and a motor control-specific MATH co-processor. On the other hand, if you are looking for flexible software development, the PSOC™ 4 family of MCUs includes custom motor control code development and intelligent algorithms. These features improve power factor by decreasing high-order harmonics, and support meeting energy labeling requirements.
  • High-performance motor control: The PSOC™ Control C3 line of MCUs, based on Arm® Cortex®-M33, focuses on single motor plus Power Factor Correction (PFC) designs. It boasts low power modes, idle sampling, high resolution versatile timers, and a CORDIC accelerator. Additional features include 128-bit Flash-read, 16 kB I-Cache, "Protection Context" flash partitioning, and accompanying code examples and development tools in the ModusToolbox™ Motor Suite software.

Cutting-Edge Human-Machine Interface (HMI) Designs for Modern Appliances

Developing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) for smart refrigerators and freezers involves addressing challenges such as ensuring interaction reliability, robustness, and liquid tolerance to provide an optimal user experience (UX). Infineon's tailored solutions effectively meet these needs, offering significant benefits for your projects. 

  • Enhance responsiveness and reliability with CAPSENSE™ Technology: Infineon's MCUs equipped with fifth-generation CAPSENSE™ touch-sensing technology enable highly responsive and reliable HMI designs. This technology ensures that smart appliance interfaces function flawlessly, even in challenging environments, due to its high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).
  • Achieve energy efficiency with ultra-low power operation: Develop products with lower energy consumption, thanks to CAPSENSE™'s ultra-low standby current and always-on sensing capabilities. This feature is particularly beneficial for battery-powered devices, extending their operational life.
  • Leverage advanced features such as liquid immunity and multi-sensing: The PSOC™ 4 and PSOC™ 6 MCU families, integrated with CAPSENSE™ technology, offer liquid immunity and presence detection for screen wake-up capabilities. Enhane further the intuitive your customers’ user experience.
  • Integrate AI/ML capabilities with PSOC™ Edge MCUs: The forthcoming PSOC™ Edge MCUs further enhance system efficiency by offloading complex tasks through AI and machine learning capabilities. They enable features such as always-on audio for voice control, multi-modal presence detection, and gesture control, pushing the boundaries of smart appliance interaction.
  • Streamline development with ModusToolbox™ Ecosystems: Both MCU families utilize this development ecosystem, providing a flexible and comprehensive HMI display control development experience, allowing for quicker and more efficient project completion.

 

Advanced Sensor Technologies Enhancing Smart Appliance Functionality

Modern refrigerators have evolved into truly "smart" IoT appliances, equipped with a variety of sensors that gather contextual information to optimize performance and user experience. Infineon's XENSIV™ sensor portfolio offers comprehensive solutions for these applications.

  • Presence detection and gesture control: Utilize XENSIV™ 60GHz radar sensors to detect presence near the refrigerator, measure distance, sense gestures, monitor liquid levels, and even detect falls.
  • Voice control enablement: Integrate XENSIV™ MEMS microphones to facilitate voice-controlled interfaces, enhancing user interaction with the appliance.
  • Energy efficiency enhancement: Employ XENSIV™ 3D magnetic and pressure sensors to monitor door status, ensuring doors are closed properly and thereby increasing energy efficiency.
  • Food freshness monitoring: Implement XENSIV™ PAS CO2 sensors to measure changes in pressure levels or CO2 concentrations to enable food freshness detection within the refrigerator.

To streamline the integration of these advanced sensor solutions into your next smart refrigerator or freezer design, Infineon provides a comprehensive portfolio of reference designs, demo boards, evaluation boards, and software solutions. These resources simplify the design process, enabling you to develop innovative and efficient appliances with ease.

 

Secure Wireless Connectivity for IoT-Enabled Refrigeration and freezing Systems

Integrating Wi-Fi connectivity into intelligent refrigerators and freezers offers numerous benefits but also raises concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy. Infineon addresses these challenges by providing robust connectivity and security solutions tailored for the IoT and smart home era.

Benefits of a connected refrigerator enabled by Infineon's AIROC™ Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi modules, which include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® chips, combo solutions, and connected microcontrollers:

  • Enhanced energy efficiency: Remotely monitor and manage your appliance to ensure optimal performance, e.g. open-door check
  • Intelligent inventory management: Utilize AI/ML-enabled microcontrollers, such as the PSOC™ Edge, to analyze food quantities and automatically reorder depleted items.
  • Smartphone integration: Connect with smartphones for calendar reminders, video calls, and more, enhancing user convenience.

To safeguard these connected smart home appliances, Infineon's OPTIGA™ Trust M and OPTIGA™ Trust M MTR products offer secured integration with other smart devices. These solutions provide up to ten times faster connection to the cloud compared to software-only approaches and offer flexibility with quick and easy access to any cloud provider, thanks to pre-personalized certificates. OPTIGA™ Trust M MTR is Matter-certified and works with any MCU/SoC, making it easy to add secured Matter compatibility to existing IoT designs.

Energy-Efficient Power Supply Solutions for Smart Refrigerators

Modern smart refrigerators and freezers require increasing power to drive advanced features such as larger touch screen displays. Infineon’s CoolSET™ power supply ICs enable this higher power delivery while remaining energy efficient. Enhancing energy efficiency is crucial for meeting decarbonization goals and adhering to energy rating standards such as U.S. Energy Star, EU IEC 62552, and China's GB 12021.2-2015. Infineon's auxiliary AC-DC Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS) solutions complement optimized motor control and ultra-low power HMI technologies to achieve higher energy efficiency ratings.

  • Efficient power conversion and flexibility
  • Discrete solutions: Utilize discrete CoolSET™ PWM flyback ICs in conjunction with user-friendly CoolMOS™ P7 superjunction (SJ) MOSFETs to ensure design flexibility and high efficiency.
  • Integrated solutions: Reduce Bill of Materials (BOM) cost, space, and development time with CoolSET™ AC-DC Integrated Power Stages (IPS). These solutions enable scalable platform designs, accommodating various power requirements through quasi-resonant or fixed-frequency families. All integrated CoolSET™ families feature low standby power consumption, cost-effectiveness, high ambient temperature tolerance, and power delivery up to 43 W.
  • Alternatively, the CoolSET™ SiP family integrates an 800 V P7 CoolMOS™, a ZVS primary controller, and a secondary SR controller using CT Link technology for isolated communication, enabling up to 60 W power delivery in a compact SMD package. This ZVS flyback solution reduces BOM cost and switching losses, improves EMI performance, and achieves over 94% efficiency, making it ideal for auxiliary power supply in refrigerators and freezers.

Evaluate Infineon's industry-leading solutions with our selection of evaluation boards and leverage our simulation tool, PowerEsim, to streamline your design process.

Comprehensive main system solutions for intelligent refrigeration and freezing

The main control system is pivotal in enabling the intelligent features and energy efficiency of modern smart refrigerators and freezers. Serving as the central hub, it manages and coordinates all appliance functions. Infineon's extensive portfolio of MCUs offers tailored solutions for various control requirements, ensuring optimal performance across basic, mid-range, and high-end applications:

  • Cost-effective control with PSOC™ 4 MCU Family based on the Arm® Cortex®-M0 core features programmable analog and digital blocks, a broad range of general and application-specific products, a unified software framework, and the capability to integrate inductive or capacitive sensing.
  • More performance at a great price-performance ratio. Infineon’s PSOC™ Control C3 family of MCUs based on Arm® Cortex®-M33 are WBG-ready and feature real-time control with high-performance 12-bit 12-MSPS SAR ADC, built-in 16-channel sample-and-hold functions, and a feature-rich timer/counter/PWM (TCPWM) block.
  • Advanced IoT capabilities with PSOC™ 6 MCU family: For applications requiring a highly configurable MCU specialized for IoT use cases, the PSOC™ 6 MCU family is an ideal choice. Based on a dual-core architecture featuring Arm® Cortex®-M4 and Cortex®-M0+ cores, this family offers a flexible and high-performance solution. It supports software-defined peripherals, making it suitable for tasks such as Bluetooth® Low Energy (BLE) communication, input/output data control, and sensor aggregation.
  • Edge AI/ML implementation with PSOC™ Edge: For implementing Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), the PSOC™ Edge Fully Integrated MCU SoC family, based on Arm® Cortex®-M55/M33 cores, offers a high-performance and low-power compute platform. This family enables developers to accelerate development with a richer set of capabilities at lower system power and cost. It facilitates AI/ML processing at the edge, addressing privacy, data bandwidth, reliability, and latency concerns typically associated with cloud-based AI/ML processing.

By selecting the appropriate Infineon MCU family, you can optimize the main control system of your smart refrigerator or freezer, enhancing both intelligent functionality and energy efficiency.

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