Why automotive motor control should scale without changing architecture

Today’s cars contain dozens of electric motors, but they do not all share the same power requirements. A seat adjustment motor, cooling fan, valve actuator and thermal-management pump may differ significantly in output power, mechanical load and board-space constraints. Even so, many of the control requirements remain familiar: PWM generation, current measurement, position estimation or sensing, communication and fault handling.

Changing the control architecture for every motor application increases software effort, validation workload and development risk. A more scalable approach is to keep the motor-control architecture consistent, while matching the level of integration to the application.

For compact brushless DC (BLDC) motor designs up to around 40W, Toshiba’s latest addition to the SmartMCD™ family, the TB9M040FTG, integrates an on-chip three-phase 2A bridge driver. This reduces the need for an external inverter stage and can help lower component count in space-constrained designs.

For higher-power applications, Toshiba’s TB9M003/030FG SmartMCD™ devices integrate three-phase MOSFET pre-drivers, allowing engineers to use external power devices for motor designs in the 40W to 1,000W range.

The distinction is important. Lower-power applications can benefit from the board-space and BOM advantages of an integrated bridge driver. Higher-power applications can retain the flexibility of an external MOSFET stage. The development approach, however, remains aligned around the same SmartMCD™ family concept.

That consistency matters when engineering teams are working across multiple vehicle functions. Experience gained on one motor-control design can carry over to the next, rather than being tied to a single device or power class.

The TB9M040FTG also supports different sensing strategies. Sensorless field-oriented control (FOC) is supported through Toshiba’s A-VEα vector engine, while applications requiring direct rotor position feedback can use Hall sensors or incremental encoders. The device also supports zero-crossing detection for BLDC motors using square-wave commutation. This flexibility allows addressing different application priorities, from low acoustic noise and smooth torque control to simpler commutation methods where appropriate.

Software structure reinforces the same idea. Toshiba’s support package separates low-level peripheral drivers from higher-layer motor-control drivers, helping engineers evaluate and implement BLDC motor control without treating each project as a completely separate software environment.

Download the whitepaper to learn how Toshiba’s new TB9M040FTG SmartMCD™, suited to cost-optimised, space-restricted applications in the sub-40W power range, enables a scalable approach to automotive BLDC motor control, allowing engineers to apply a common development environment and motor-control architecture across applications.