By Jahangir Mansoori, Senior Engineer, System Application Engineering, Infineon Technologies, India
The number of electrical motors in vehicles is increasing rapidly and replacing the traditionally mechanical motors as they have an advantage of CO2 reduction and energy efficiency. Present architectures are based on the decentralised mechatronic motor control systems. There is a demand for more robust, flexible and intelligent motor driver ICs to help the manufacturer in optimizing the end product size and performance. Tier ones and car manufacturers are working together on the strategy towards electrification of auxiliary components in vehicles.
Infineon has combined its wealth of experience in motor control drivers for automotive applications with all the benefits of an industry-standard core. This results in third generation embedded power IC based on ARM® Cortex™-M cores. With this embedded power family, Infineon now addresses applications from low-end relay motor control to high-end BLDC motor control via MOSFETs.
Infineon Technologies launched an intelligent motor driver chip platform with a 32 bit ARM Cortex M3 processor inside. This embedded power family of motor drivers offers an unmatched level of integration to address the growing trend towards intelligent motor control for a wide range of automotive applications that are not limited to water pumps, engine cooling fan, HVAC fans, fuel pumps, wiper and window lift.
Infineon® embedded power ICs are specifically designed to enable mechatronic motor control solutions for a wide range of motor control applications. These ICs are produced on Infineon’s proprietary automotive qualified 130nm smart power manufacturing technologies.
Infineon is the first one in the industry to integrate on one single chip a high-performance microcontroller using the ARM Cortex-M3 processor, as well as the nonvolatile memory, the analog and mixed signal peripherals, the communication interfaces along with the MOSFET gate drivers. Thus, the Infineon embedded power family offers 32-bit performance in an application space that it is typically associated with 16-bit. They have been developed to address the growing trend towards intelligent motor control in automotive applications.
The embedded power family is available in a standard QFN package of only 7mm x 7mm in dimension. In previous conventional motor control designs you needed a standalone microcontroller, a bridge driver and a local interconnect network (LIN) transceiver for motor control, but now automotive system suppliers are benefited of minimum external components count using E-power for motor control.
The newly-released embedded power products reduce the component count by more than 60 per cent, thus allowing integration of all functions and associated external components for the motor control in a PCB area of merely 3cm². E-power System cost optimized solution offers customer bill of material (BOM) savings by utilizing dual stage charge pumps resulting in use of 2 capacitor to meet supply voltage of 5.5V,Single shunt current measurement in comparison with multi op-amp methods, implementing driver slope control that offers an ease of EMC design for a wide range of power loads and are not limited to a specific NFET. Thereby, the embedded power family enables integration of electronics close to the motor for true mechatronic designs.
The first two family members of the Infineon® embedded power IC portfolio are the TLE987x series for 3-phase (brushless DC) motors and the TLE986x series for 2phase (DC) motors.
The TLE986x is a single chip 2-phase motor driver that integrates the industry standard ARM® Cortex™ M3 core. It includes four fully integrated NFET drivers optimized to drive a 2-phase motor via four external power NFETs. Its peripheral set includes a current sensor, a successive approximation ADC synchronized with the capture and compare unit for PWM control and 16-bit timers. It includes adjustable current slope for optimized EMC behaviour and a charge pump enabling low voltage operation. A LIN transceiver is also integrated to enable communication to the device along with a number of general purpose I/Os.
It includes an on-chip linear voltage regulator to supply external loads. The products can withstand load dump conditions up to 40V while maintaining an extended supply voltage operating down to 3.0V where the microcontroller and the flash memory are fully functional. The TLE986x family offers scalability in terms of flash memory sizes from 36kB to 128kB and MCU system clock frequency ranging from 24Mhz to 40Mhz, supporting a wide range of motor control algorithms.
The device offers cost and space efficient solutions for mechatronics DC motor driver applications such as sunroof, power window lift, wiper, etc.
TLE987x is a single chip 3-phase motor driver that integrates the industry standard ARM® Cortex™ M3 core, enabling implementation of advanced motor control algorithms such as field-oriented control. It includes six fully-integrated NFET drivers optimized to drive a 3-phase motor via six external power NFETs. An integrated charge pump enables low voltage operation using only two external capacitors, resulting in a significant BoM reduction when compared with the commonly used voltage bootstrap techniques.
The TLE987x series of bridge drivers addresses 3-phase (BLDC) motor applications such as fuel pumps, HVAC blowers, engine cooling fans, water pumps as well as other pumps and fans. It supports sensor-less and sensor-based (including field-oriented control) BLDC motor applications addressed by LIN or controlled via PWM. Its LIN transceiver is compatible with LIN 2.2. An internal oscillator provides a cost-effective and suitable clock in particular for LIN slave nodes. A 10 bit SAR ADC is implemented for high precision sensor measurement and an 8 bit ADC can be used for diagnosis measurement. It includes an on-chip linear voltage regulator to supply external loads.
It includes micro controller unit (MCU) supervision, supply voltage supervision and system protection, including reset feature along with programmable window watchdog. A wake up from the power saving mode is possible via a LIN bus message or monitoring inputs or with a cyclic wake up.
The TLE987x family offers scalability in terms of flash memory sizes from 36Kb to 128Kb and MCU system clock frequency from 24Mhz to 40Mhz supporting a wide range of motor control algorithms, either sensor based or sensor-less. It is a highly integrated automotive qualified device enabling cost and space efficient solutions for mechatronic BLDC motor drive applications such as pumps and fans.
With E-power family, Infineon offers a single platform solution for 2-phase and 3-phase motor control, 32 bit ARM M3 processor enables user to run FOC for the motor control applications such as fan and pumps at 40Mhz with less than 50% of CPU loads. Reusable of well-known peripherals from XC2000 MCU products such as CCU6, GPT12, etc., enable the user to reuse the software for a wide range of motors and as a result reduces the development cost.
This Infineon® embedded power IC is well supported by a complete development tool chain provided by Infineon and third party vendors. The tool chain includes compiler, debugger, evaluation board, LIN low level driver and configuration tool as well as example software code for motor control.