Refrigerators and freezers
Design smart and highly energy-efficient refrigerator and freezer systems with Infineon solutions for HMI, compressor motors, and more
Designing a modern smart fridge and freezer comes with many challenges. These include the requirement for low energy consumption that conforms to regulations, the need to balance cost competitiveness with high performance, and the requirement for compact designs that increase storage space. Additionally, design engineers must deliver an enhanced user experience, seamless interoperability and connectivity between devices within a smart home, and ensure data protection and authentication.
Achieve all of this and more when you source your refrigerator and freezer Bill of Material (BOM) and solutions from the industry's most comprehensive portfolio.
Explore our interactive block diagram to find the right products
When it comes to increasing energy efficiency in smart refrigerators and freezers, the motor inverter drive and motor control designs in the compressor are the most crucial.
Infineon's comprehensive range and knowhow support you mastering any design challenges with advanced technologies.
• For high light load efficiency and ESD immunity in household refrigerators and freezers, the CoolMOS™ 8 and PFD 7 families of MOSFETs are optimized to reduce energy consumption and enhance system durability. Alternatively, when integration is required, save board space with the CIPOS™ Micro family of IPMs that offer a wide range of footprints and strong humidity robustness for harsh environments.
• For full load operations in commercial refrigerators and freezers, the 600 V Reverse Conducting Drive 2 RC-D2 family of IGBTs minimizes EMI and ensures reliable performance under heavy loads, or the CIPOS™ Mini family of IPMs featuring high integration and rugged SOI gate driver technology.
• Create heatsink-less designs ideal for compact and cost-effective solutions, such as refrigerator compressor motors, with the CoolGaN™ family of HV GaN HEMTs.
• Ensure precise control and robustness of your inverter motor drives with Infineon's small form factor and reliable level-shift EiceDRIVER™ gate drivers to complement these devices.
By leveraging Infineon's innovations, you can achieve heightened energy efficiency, reliability, and performance in your motor drive applications.
On the motor control side, Infineon also offers you a wide range of microcontrollers - the heart of any motor control design – that fit any corner case that you might have:
The most cost-effective motor control solution, the XMC1300/1400 MCU family, is the right choice for controlling a single compressor motor on a budget. The family is based on Arm® Cortex®-M0, features 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.
When you need software flexibility for custom motor control code development and intelligent algorithms, the PSOC™ 4100s family of MCUs is the ideal match. These features improve power factor by decreasing high order harmonics and help to meet energy labelling requirements.
On the high-performance end, and specifically designed for motor control, the (coming soon) PSOC™ Control C3 line of MCUs based on Arm® Cortex®-M33. This breakthrough family of MCUs focuses on single motor + PFC designs, boasting low power modes, idle sampling, high resolution versatile timers, and a CORDIC accelerator. It also boasts 128-bit Flash-read, 16 kB I-Cache, a "Protection Context" flash partitioning, and accompanying code examples and development tools in the ModusToolbox™ Motor Suite software.
Designing Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI) for smart refrigerators and freezers involves overcoming numerous challenges, such as ensuring the reliability of the interactions, robustness, and liquid tolerance, in order to offer the best user experience (UX) to end users. Infineon's solutions are tailored to address your needs effectively, offering significant benefits for your projects.
- Enable highly responsive and reliable HMI designs with our MCUs, equipped with CAPSENSE™ touch-sensing technology: it ensures that your smart appliance interfaces function flawlessly, even in challenging environments due to high SNR.
- Develop products with lower energy consumption due to energy-efficient device’s operations since CAPSENSE™ has ultra-low standby current and always-on sensing capabilities.
- With liquid immunity and multi-sensing capabilities, the PSOC™ 4000T and PSOC™ Edge MUC families with integrated CAPSENSE™ technology support advanced features like liquid level sensing and presence detection for screen wake-up, enhancing the intuitive user experience.
- Furthermore, the (coming soon) PSOC™ Edge MCUs take it a step further with AI/ML (machine learning) capabilities, optimizing system efficiency by offloading complex tasks and enabling features such as always-on audio for voice control, multi-modal presence, and gesture control.
Both MCU families utilize the ModusToolbox™ development ecosystem for a flexible and comprehensive HMI display control development experience - quicker and more efficiently.
A modern fridge is truly a "smart" IoT appliance, as it knows what's going on inside and outside. How? By using a host of sensors which gather contextual information from all over the home appliance.
- Detect presence close to the fridge, measure distance, sense gestures or liquid level or even detect falls with XENSIV™ radar sensors.
- Enable voice control with XENSIV™ MEMS microphones.
- Ensure increased energy efficiency for the end user with XENSIV™ 3D magnetic and pressure sensors that report open door status.
- Measure changes in pressure level or CO2 to detect the freshness of the food within the refrigerator using XENSIV™ PAS CO2 sensors.
With a portfolio of reference designs, demo boards, evaluation boards, and software solutions available, you can make the design-in of your next truly smart refrigerator and freezer design even easier.
The problem with connecting your fridge to a Wi-Fi network? The potential for cyberattack and other privacy concerns. However, Infineon offers both connectivity and security solutions for the IoT and smart home age. The benefits of a connected refrigerator include:
- Increased energy efficiency with the ability to remotely check if a door is open
- Analyze the amount of food inside and automatically reorder depleted items via AI/ML-enabled MCUs like PSOC™ Edge
- Connection with a smartphone for calendar reminders, video calls, and more.
All of this is possible with Infineon AIROC™ Bluetooth® and Wi-Fi modules for IoT-enabled refrigerators, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth® chips, combos, and connected MCUs.
To protect these connected smart home appliances, OPTIGA™ Trust M and OPTIGA™ Trust M MTR products make integration with other smart devices even easier. Offering Up to ten times faster connection to the cloud when compared to software-only solutions and flexibility with fast and easy access to any cloud provider thanks to pre-personalized certificates, OPTIGA™ Trust is your gateway to the Matter-enabled fully connected smart home.
As a leader in efficient power semiconductor and power system solutions, Infineon provides everything you need for auxiliary power systems in your next energy-efficient smart refrigerator and freezer. One critical way to approach decarbonization is to increase the energy rating labels of home appliances. These regulations and standards include the U.S. Energy Star, the EU IEC 62552, or the Chinese GB 12021.2-2015.
Our auxiliary AC-DC SMPS power conversion solutions join our optimized motor control and ultra-low power HMI solutions to achieve these higher ratings and energy efficiency.
- Ensure flexibility with discrete CoolSET™ PWM flyback ICs used together with easy-to-use CoolMOS™ P7 superjunction (SJ) MOSFETs.
- Save BOM cost, space, and time with CoolSET™ AC-DC Integrated Power Stages (IPS). The IPS solutions enable scalable platform design with the availability to scale for different power requirements using the quasi-resonant family, or instead scale for different grid environments with the fixed frequency family. All integrated CoolSET™ families feature low standby power, a lower cost, high ambient temperature, and power delivery up to 43W.
Experience fast start-up performance and further increase system robustness and protection with the CoolSET™ family of AC-DC PWM controllers. Evaluate our industry-leading solutions for yourself with our selection of evaluation boards and make use of our simulation tool, PowerEsim.
One crucial component of enabling the intelligent features and energy efficiency of modern smart refrigerators and freezers is the main control system. This functional block is the central hub that manages and coordinates all the functions of the home appliance. Infineon's wide portfolio of microcontrollers has something to offer for everyone. Whether you are looking for basic, mid-end, or high-end control, we offer various MCU families and the accompanying software to fit your needs.
A cost-effective solution, the PSOC™ 4 MCU family based on Arm® Cortex®-M0 is your problem solver on chip. These microcontrollers feature programmable analog and digital blocks, a wide portfolio of general and application-specific products, a common software framework, and the possibility to integrate inductive or capacitive sensing.
For use cases requiring a highly configurable MCU that is specialized for IoT use cases such as BLE Stack, I/O data control, and sensor aggregation, Infineon offers the PSOC™ 6 MCU family based on Arm® Cortex®-M4/M0+. This family offers a flexible and high-performance dual core architecture and software-defined peripherals.
When you need to move fast, check out the XMC4000 family of MCUs based on Arm® Cortex®-M4 with FPU. These feature a built-in DSP instruction set and a common set of fast and precise analog mixed signals, as well as Timer/PWM, and communication peripherals.
For implementing Edge AI/ML, look no further than the (coming soon) PSOC™ Edge Fully Integrated MCU SoC family based on Arm® Cortex®-M55/M33. This family enables developers to move faster, with a richer set of capabilities, at lower system power and cost. This high performance and low power compute family makes AI/ML on the Edge possible, which helps to alleviate the privacy, data bandwidth, reliability, and latency concerns normally associated with AI/ML.