TI Releases Integrated Three-Phase Brushless Motor Pre-Driver

Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) introduced the first in a new line of integrated three-phase brushless motor pre-drivers. According to TI, the DRV8301 is the most highly integrated pre-driver available today, reducing board space as much as 60% compared to the next closest integrated solution. It can drive sub-10 to 60A external FETs, providing current scalability, improved thermal performance and greater efficiency in brushless dc (BLDC) and permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) applications, such as ventilation pumps, medical pumps, commercial refrigeration cooling systems, robotics, power tools, e-bikes and other high-torque industrial motor control applications.

The highly integrated DRV8301 reduces board space, bill of materials and system complexity while improving reliability. In addition to a fully protected three-phase brushless gate driver, it includes a 1.5A step-down voltage regulator to power the system microcontroller (MCU), such as the C2000™ Piccolo™; two current-sense amplifiers with integrated input and feedback resistors for current measurements; and a SPI interface for device configuration from the MCU.

Key features and benefits include:

– Three-phase brushless gate driver provides gate drive current up to 1.7A source and 2.3A sink from a single 8 to 60V supply. Slew rate and dead-time can be adjusted to optimize performance.

– 1.5A step-down voltage regulator: Operating from 3.5 to 60V, the regulator provides power for the MCU or other system components.

– Two bi-directional current-sense amplifiers: Includes adjustable gain, output offset and dc calibration circuitry to reduce board space and system cost. The dc calibration circuitry minimizes DC offset and drift over temperature to improve motor performance.

Fully protected: Two-stage thermal, cycle-by-cycle over current protection, under-voltage, and shoot through protection with detailed fault feedback reduces design complexity and improves system reliability.

A high-current evaluation kit (DRV8301-HC-C2-KIT) is available today for a suggested retail price of $299. The kit includes the DRV8301 motor driver, a 32-bit C2000 Piccolo MCU controlCARD module, a quick-start graphical user interface (GUI), full development source code and Code Composer Studio™ (CCStudio) integrated development environment (IDE). Multiple GUI and reference projects are available for the DRV8301-HC-C2-KIT, including trapezoidal sensorless and sensorless field oriented control (FOC).

The 32-bit C2000 Piccolo MCU controlCARD module included in the DRV8301 evaluation kit comes with TI’s new InstaSPIN(TM)-BLDC sensorless motor control solution, a unique back-electromagnetic field (EMF) technique that allows designers to spin motors in seconds, without knowledge of motor parameters.

The DRV8301 is available today in a 14 x 8.1mm HTSSOP package for a suggested retail price of $2.50 for 1,000 units. For simpler hardware-based device configuration, the DRV8302 integrated three-phase brushless motor pre-driver will be available in 3Q 2011.

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