EC motor driver for industrial and automotive applications, completely configurable via SPI interface

Provided with many protection mechanisms and universally usable:

Milton Keynes, Dec.11, 2009 - The EC motor driver E910.87 is now available from Gleichmann Sunrise. Thanks to its particularly flexible configuration options and diverse protection mechanisms, the device is usable in a wide range of automotive and industrial applications.

With the gate driver ICs for six NMOS FETs, developed by ELMOS, the individual driver outputs can be controlled with up to 60 kHz and the driver currents are adjustable from 40 mA to 300 mA. Control of the EC motor itself takes place via the power FETs of the 3 half-bridges (B6).

The charge pump applied allows duty factors for the high-side drivers of up to 100%. The motor control interface between microcontroller and motor driver IC consists of six PWMs for driving the six power transistors. Particularly for use with low performance microcontrollers, the E910.87 can also be installed so that three PWMs are sufficient for driving the power stage.

Further characteristics of the device include an integrated window watchdog, integrated free run comparators and motor current measurement with programmable amplification. Features such as amplification factor of current limitation, overcurrent threshold and error interrupts can be adjusted and configured in a simple and direct manner via the integrated SPI interface.

The diverse protection functions include protection against phase and gate short-circuits, cross-current protection, over-voltage and under-voltage protection for high-side and low-side driver supply, gate-source voltage limitation of high-side drivers and an over-temperature warning.

The EC motor driver E910.87 is designed for an extended temperature range of -40°C to +125°C and comes in a small 7x7 mm, 44-pin QFN package. Samples and evaluation boards are available from Gleichmann Sunrise.