Smart motor control for automotive applications

Smart motor control for automotive applications

Increasingly, modern automobiles are making use of brushless DC (BLDC) motors in subsystems such as pumps, fans, sunroofs, tailgates, windshield wipers and much more.

Driving these motors is easy, but to drive them in an optimal way is far more challenging. Approaches such as vector or Field-Oriented Control (FOC) deliver smooth operation over a wide speed range but they require a significant amount of microcontroller (MCU) capacity to operate.

Increasingly, designers are taking the task of controlling the BLDC motor away from the MCU and implementing a dedicated motor control driver, such as Toshiba’s TB9M003FG SmartMCDä.

This comprehensive solution is based upon Toshiba’s advanced mixed-signal process and utilises an ArmÒ CortexÒ CPU running at 40MHz with a high-performance hardware vector engine co-processor to achieve FOC cycle times below 30 µsec and gate drivers to control external B6 N-channel MOSFETs. The highly integrated system-on-chip (SoC) has  several functional blocks to provide a single-chip complete control system for single-shunt BLDC motor operation.

At the heart of the system is the vector engine (A-VEa) that supports a number of transformations as well as PI for current control. The vector engine drives the programmable motor driver (PMD) that generates PWM various carrier signals with individual waveforms possible for each phase. Three optional Hall sensor inputs are available for rotor position sensing of the BLDC motor.

Also integrated into the TB9M003FG is a six-channel gate driver with slew rate control to control external MOSFETs. This block is capable of detecting open- and short-circuit MOSFETs, ensuring system robustness. The twelve GPIO lines are able to be multiplexed with other interfaces to provide a variety of communication interfaces, including LIN, UART2 and SPI.

To assist designers, Toshiba has developed a SmartMCD evaluation kit developed around a microcontroller development kit and the TB9M003FG evaluation board, along with four varieties of inverter boards featuring automotive-grade power N-channel MOSFETs from Toshiba.

The evaluation kit is complemented by ‘Motor Studio’, an easy-to-use and versatile PC tool that logs multiple parameters and allows easy system evaluation and debugging.

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