Atmel intros all-in-one motor driver for automotive
Richard Wilson
Monday 04 April 2011 14:43
Atmel’s latest gate drivers for 3-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motor control applications are designed to be industry’s first self-contained drivers.
With six-output stages for direct motor control, they are designed to operate with an AVR microcontroller (MCU), and an on-chip Atmel automotive LIN transceiver IP for in-car communication.
The Atmel ATA6844 is an “under-the-hood” device, with a high-temperature version that operates at chip temperatures of up to 200 degrees C.
It is manufactured in Atmel’s BCD-on-SOI technology SMART-I.S. for extreme temperatures. It can be directly connected to hot actuators, so simplifies wiring.
The firm’s AVR microcontrollers support the basis gate driver ICs in various BLDC motors with Hall sensors as well as sensorless BLDC motors with back-electromagnetic force (BEMF) sensing.
With the devices’ six input stages, the MCU individually controls each of the six output stages.
The MCU also defines the adjustable overcurrent detection threshold of the ATA6843/44 to enable a current monitoring tailored to the various types of power mosfets used in the application.
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