Integrated gate driver ICs for automotive BLDC motor-control apps

Atmel Corporation has made available its new set of gate driver ICs. The Atmel ATA6843 and ATA6844 devices are new members of the Atmel's gate driver family designed for 3-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motor control applications including turbo chargers, waste gates, EGR, pumps, fans, power window, power doors and power seats. They feature six-output stages and the MCU individually controls each of the six output stages.

Atmel claims the new driver ICs are the only products in the industry to incorporate all the essential functional blocks to supply and monitor a microcontroller in BLDC motor control applications. This feature enables a smaller footprint for applications with limited space and increases the overall system safety.

The new Atmel ATA6844 is a high-temperature version to operate at chip temperatures of up to 200°C. The device is manufactured in Atmel's own BCD-on-SOI technology SMART-I.S. for extreme temperatures, and enables direct attachment of the ECU to hot actuators for short wiring and optimized construction.

The new gate driver ICs ATA6843 and ATA6844 offer protection and diagnostic functions, such as monitoring of overtemperature, overvoltage, undervoltage, short-circuit conditions and charge-pump failures. All incidents are communicated via three-diagnostic outputs to the microcontroller to enable appropriate countermeasures. A coast function allows simultaneous disabling of all six output stages in case of emergency. The on-board integrated watchdog independently monitors the MCU to increase the overall system safety, eliminating an additional external component. Dangerous short-circuit currents caused by faulty control signals are prevented from the pin-programmable timer stage that allows users to set a dead time for disabling unintended simultaneous activation of a high-side and a low-side power MOSFET within one branch.

With Atmel's LIN2.1-compliant transceiver IP integrated on chip, the new system basis gate driver ICs are suggested for in-car communication via the standard automotive network.

Availability and Pricing: Samples of the ATA6843 and ATA6844 are available now, both in QFN48 7 x 7mm packages. Pricing starts at USD $2.10 (ATA6843) and $2.40 (ATA6844) for quantities of 10,000.