Due to their numerous advantages, three-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motors are becoming the preferred choice for designing modern battery-powered motor products. However, reducing its size and weight to improve ergonomics and extend battery life leads to design challenges.
To help designers achieve end-market objectives, Infineon Technologies has released the MOTIX IMD700A and IMD701A fully programmable motor controllers. They come in 9 x 9 mm 2 and 64-pin VQFN packages, offering the desired integration and higher power density needed in cordless power tools, gardening products, drones, electric bicycles and automated guided vehicles.
In a single package, the MOTIX IMD70xA controllers combine all the features of the MOTIX 6EDL7141 three-phase gate driver IC with an additional XMC1404 microcontroller (MCU), whose peripherals and specifications are optimized for motor and drive control. Infineon's XMC1404 MCU includes a MATH coprocessor clocked at 96 MHz to enhance calculations commonly used in sensorless field-oriented control (FOC) algorithms, enabling greater system performance.
To ensure best-in-class control, the XMC1404 inherits most of the state-of-the-art peripherals found in the XMC4000 family, including PWM timers, position interface (POSIF), and serial communication modules (including CAN).
The motor control IC has the ability to control the rate of change of the gate drive to minimize system EMI. The IMD70xA controllers support adjustable gate drive supply voltage, even at low battery voltage levels, thanks to integrated charge pumps on the high and low sides and other adjustable gate driver parameters. EMI management by gate drive digital configuration offers an advantage, allowing optimization in EMI test facilities without the need to change any board components.
Additionally, both products have a full suite of motor drive-specific system protection features such as OCP, UVLO, overheating and blocked rotor detection, offering greater reliability and robustness.
The new devices offer integrated precision power supply and current sensing amplifiers, reducing the need for peripheral circuitry, external component count and PCB space. This leads to simplified routing and reduces BOM and assembly costs, while offering improved system packaging possibilities for designers to address the challenges of housing motor drives in small, odd-shaped cavities found in such applications.
Furthermore, thanks to the 6EDL7141 gate driver, they offer maximum flexibility and many highly configurable functions that can be defined from a user-friendly GUI tool, which interfaces with a PC via an SPI interface connected via a USB port.