onsemi — ECS640A BLDC Motor Controller IC

The ECS640A from onsemi, a 600 V motor controller, provides a single-chip system for driving and controlling three-phase brushless dc (BLDC) motors.

The first part in a new ecoSpin™ family of motor controller products, the integrated ECS640A combines an Arm® Cortex®-M0+ microcontroller core with high-performance gate drivers and feedback circuitry in a single package which has a footprint of just 10 mm x 13 mm. The device simplifies the design of embedded motor control systems, improves system reliability, and enables designers to achieve faster time-to-market.

The ECS640A system-in-package (SiP) forms the basis for scalable BLDC motor designs. Its Arm core can support various traditional motor control techniques such as trapezoidal and vector control. In addition, the ECS640A can drive a more complex direct torque and flux control (DTFC) algorithm which supports high-voltage and high-power operation via a scalable three-phase half-bridge topology with integrated protection circuits.

The ECS640A’s embedded 600 V gate driver and dedicated motor control engine are able to provide the required PWM modulation signals in DTFC mode to external discrete power FETs or IGBTs, and to capture measurements of the motor’s corresponding three-phase currents through an external shunt-current feedback. These three motor-current signals can be conditioned internally using the embedded operational amplifier structure, which is optimally paired to the MCU core to reduce losses.

The ECS640A motor controller provides multiple communication interfaces, including serial peripheral, UART and I2C, and GPIOs. The device offers great scope to apply complex proprietary protocols. Sensorless and sensored operation are both supported.

Use of the integrated ecoSpin ECS640A reduces time-to-market by eliminating the need to separately select and design in a microcontroller, gate driver, bootstrap diode and op amp. The motor controller also makes it simpler to reuse design IP when scaling to higher or lower BLDC motor power levels.

As a single SiP, the ECS640A offers higher reliability than a circuit based on multiple discrete devices, while also reducing PCB routing area.