Home appliances

For decades, washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners and co. have been big household helpers – and enormous energy guzzlers. What if you could reduce their energy consumption, and contribute to lower CO² emissions, by choosing more efficient components for your designs? Doing so would enable both major and small home appliances to continue completing everyday tasks, but at significantly lower environmental and financial costs. 

At Infineon, we are a one-stop shop for major home appliance designs. We understand your needs and support your projects with our complete solutions. Our proven application expertise and broad portfolio of semiconductors, sensors and security solutions help you overcome the challenges common to the latest generation of systems. You benefit from optimized, energy-efficient designs featuring our cutting-edge semiconductor technology. And you’ll find solutions to make your projects secured and smart-home ready.

There are three key challenges major home appliance manufacturers face today: meeting increasingly demanding energy-efficiency regulations; accommodating high power density in a slim, compact design; and enabling secured, software-based smart functions. While each can be tricky, every challenge can be overcome with the right component selection and our design support.

Energy efficiency is and will remain a decisive factor for consumers and manufacturers. That is why inverterization is so important. In refrigerator, washing machine, and air conditioner designs, a digital inverter regulates the motor, turning it on and off as needed and driving it at variable speeds. This smart technology enables an appliance to consume less electricity, increasing its energy-efficiency without compromising on performance.

Inverterization works using an intelligent combination of semiconductors, including microcontrollers, sensors and power chips. Instead of always running at full speed, an inverterized motor is able to perform precisely as required. A digital inverter first uses sensors to gather data about environmental conditions (humidity, temperature) and the motor’s rotational speed. Then, a microcontroller determines the required power and the power chips execute the commands, making it a highly efficient and smart team.

In the future, inverterization is in a good position to become standard in major home appliances. Today, 65 percent of air conditioning systems and 61 percent of washing machines are equipped with a digital inverter. By 2022, these figures are expected to grow to 99 percent and 96 percent, respectively. Consumers are increasingly inclined to purchase a home appliance with inverter technology because of benefits ranging from longer appliance lifetime and less noise, to a lower energy bill.

The other two challenges, high power density and smart functions, are intertwined to a certain degree. The realm of smart home is taking the world by a storm. As a result, the latest home appliance manufacturers are under pressure to offer an increasingly longer list of enhanced features and capabilities. What is great for consumers is a challenge for engineers who are limited by the PCB board’s size and space. The solution lies in smaller components. With no room to compromise on performance, semiconductors must exemplify higher power density and higher switching frequency.

In the highly competitive home appliance market, one of the best ways for a manufacturer to succeed is through differentiation. Quiet, smooth-running products featuring smart, new energy-efficient solutions are also in high demand today. A small footprint, slim profile and a high degree of integration, at a low price point, round out the must-have list. With in-house smart appliances experts, Infineon is the go-to source of components and design support for those who want to effortlessly stand out from the competition.

To summarize, there is one way to ensure your designs meet the needs of manufacturers and consumers alike: use Infineon’s complete lineup of high-quality, reliable hardware and software products to engineer your home appliance projects. Coupled with our in-depth know-how and high production capacity, we are the right choice for your system designs.

Whether you need a customized or ready-to-use solution, and whether you are designing a budget or a luxury appliance, we have the best-fit components for your requirements. And we look forward to meeting your project’s needs.

Use our Solution Finder to quickly and easily find, compare and purchase the right semiconductors for your project. Simply select your application and the online tool visualizes suitable components in useful system diagrams, which you can customize to your needs.

You can already access 400 solutions for motor control and drive applications in our tool. Coming soon: solutions for lighting, power supplies and other applications.

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