Refrigerators and freezers

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.

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.

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.

As a leader in efficient power semiconductor and power system solutions, Infineon provides comprehensive offerings for auxiliary power systems in energy-efficient smart refrigerators and freezers. 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 CoolSET™ PWM flyback ICs in conjunction with user-friendly CoolMOS™ P7 superjunction (SJ) MOSFETs to ensure design flexibility and high efficiency.

• 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 43W.
• Enhanced system performance and protection: Experience fast start-up performance and increased system robustness with the CoolSET™ family of AC-DC PWM controllers. These controllers incorporate advanced protection features to ensure reliable operation in various conditions.

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

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.

• 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.

• High-performance control with XMC4000 MCU family: When rapid development and high performance are essential, the XMC4000 family of MCUs, based on the Arm® Cortex®-M4 with Floating Point Unit (FPU), is a compelling option. These microcontrollers feature a built-in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) instruction set, fast and precise analog mixed-signal capabilities, as well as advanced Timer/PWM and communication peripherals.
• 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.