Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbay808 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a spec sheet for your MPPT chip that you can share? The white paper and video presentation that you linked appear to be completely unrelated.

View on HN

I am writing the datasheet for the reconfigurable MPPT bidirectional buck/boost flyback invertor microcontroller SoC chips as we speak [1]. Do you have an email I can send it to?

The older white paper is very much related, it describes the large power router chips, the MPPT nano-invertor microcontroller chips for individual solar cells are just a recent adddition to our system of line chips.

The video presentation is about the wafer scale integration, a million core giant version of the same microprocessor as the tiny MPPT chips, so they are very much related.

[1] Morphle MNI003 datasheet:

input voltage: 0.01V-6.01V (solar cell or battery input)

output voltage: 0.6V-12V (aggregated or single output)

can power up from solar cell or battery, 0,02W

External inductor (30-100 μH) needed.

Builtin 8 opamps, 4 power mosfets, 3 capacitors, 3 diodes

Forms a programmable reconfigurable MPPT inverter or a Li-ion (all 6 chemistries) battery charger and discharger.

180 Mhz 64 Bit Microprocessor made from 8 bit ALU slices. Can be configured at runtime as 8 x 8b it, 4 x 16 bit, 2 x 32 bit and 1 x 64 bit processors. Microcode processor executes X86-64, ArmV8, Risc-V instructions and Python and Squeak bytecodes natively.

4K OTP memory

16K SRAM

SPI interface to external flash

one-wire network over power input and output wire two-wire 10baseT ethernet to wire all inverters into networks up to 10240 microcontrollers

networked MNI003 chips can aggregate output voltages up to 240V DC

Thanks; I'm working on products in this area and not especially satisfied by the parts available. Especially as Analog seems to be abandoning their micro-MPPT IC product line. My email is jacob at jbaylessconsulting dot ca.

One of the common issues with solar micro-MPPT is EMI emissions. Have you tested for compliance with emitted radio-frequency noise standards?

Yes and no. If you run the inverters or network at 100Khz up to 1 Mhz you get much different EMI than if you run them at 1 Khz. The inductor and ADC also play a role. We will know this only after we mass produce the chip, my test chips and prototypes (with RP2040 and Padauk PMS150) have similar but not the same EMI emissions.

- We could package the chip, for example wrap it entirely with the metal inductor. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. But will this raise the price?

- You put the chip between the solar cell and the (flat) wires. That works as a faraday cage and block the emissions. Will the solar panel maker do this?

- You could have solar cells without the panel, think fo a CD size solar cell encased in plastic just as a CD is a metal foil encased in plastic. Now you can wrap the chip and block the emissions. You can hang the cell from the wires (in a tree or on the distribution wire like christmas lights)

I forgot to mention a single chip has three inverters in it for three solar cells or batteries or a combination of two cells and one battery.

There are 6 ADC's on board.

The 8 bit cores are very much like the I/O processors of the RP2040 Raspberry Pico chip

Reply on news.ycombinator.com