Courtesy: Infineon
Motors and motor control are found everywhere around us in our day-to-day life. Conventionally, most of the low-power motor control applications often use brushed motors due to their simple construction and lower cost. However, by the rapid growth in the field of digital electronics and microcontrollers, these brushed motors are being replaced by brushless motors due to the numerous advantages and reliability. Brushless motors offer many interesting features such as low maintenance, better controllability, and efficiency. Among the brushless motors, single-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motors are well suited for low-power compact systems and can directly replace the brushed DC motor as both are powered by the same single-phase power. However, due to the absence of contact brushes, controlling a brushless DC motor requires an electronic commutation using a microcontroller.
Infineon’s EZ-PD PMG1-S0 device is a high-voltage low-cost microcontroller (MCU) featuring USB-C Power Delivery (PD) and integrated Arm Cortex M0 CPU with up to 64 KB Flash and 8 KB RAM. They also include analog peripherals such as ADCs and digital peripherals such as TCPWM to facilitate development of motor control systems.
The solution in Figure 1 shows a simple integrated single-phase BLDC motor control system design using EZ-PD PMG1-S0 and TLE9201SG H-bridge. TLE9201SG is an H-bridge IC consisting of integrated N-MOSFET H-bridge, NFET gate drivers and additional control logic and protection circuitry which is well-suited for developing a single-phase motor controller. The hardware design is relatively simple with minimum external components used. Additionally, the USB Power Delivery (PD) capability of PMG1 MCU enables us to easily expand the scope of the application to target the electronic gadgets that use USB-C negotiable power.
The ideal applications targeted for this motor control solution are listed in Figure 2. They include USB PD powered low-consumer consumer electronic gadgets and body care equipment such as hair-driers, massage guns, trimmers, and shavers. The application also extends to air-cooled and liquid-cooled systems where the motor drives the cooling fan and pump respectively. The solution also supports high-speed motor drive (greater than 20000 RPM) which enables it to be used in blowers and vacuum cleaner as well.
