TI’s integrated three-phase brushless motor pre-driver reduces board space up to 60 percent while driving up to 60-A FETs

BANGALORE, INDIA: Texas Instruments Inc. (TI) introduced the first in a new line of integrated three-phase brushless motor pre-drivers. The DRV8301 is the most highly integrated pre-driver available today, reducing board space as much as 60 percent compared to the next closest integrated solution.

It can drive sub-10-A to 60-A 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 1.5-A 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
• Three-phase brushless gate driver: Provides gate drive current up to 1.7-A source and 2.3-A sink from a single 8-V to 60-V supply. Slew rate and dead-time can be adjusted to optimize performance.
• 1.5-A step-down voltage regulator: Operating from 3.5 V to 60 V, 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 reduces design complexity and improves system reliability.