Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation has started volume shipments of the SmartMCD™ Series of gate driver^[1] ICs with embedded microcontroller (MCU). The first product, TB9M003FG, is suitable for sensorless control of three-phase brushless DC motors used in automotive applications, including water and oil pumps, fans, and blowers.

Gate Driver IC with Embedded MCU

Mainly, TB9M003FG combines a microcontroller (Arm® Cortex®-M0), flash memory, power control functions and communications interface functions into a gate driver. This, in turn, controls and drives N-ch power MOSFETs for three-phase brushless DC motor drives. Particularly, this integration will reduce system sizes and component counts while realizing advanced and complex motor control for a wide variety of automotive motor applications. Also, the new product incorporates Toshiba’s proprietary vector engine, hardware for sensorless sinewave control. Accordingly, this reduces the load on the MCU and the size of the software.

Additionally, a reference design using TB9M003FG, “Motor Driving Circuit for Automotive Body Electronics Using SmartMCD™,” is now available on Toshiba’s website.

Generally, the expanding market for electric vehicles (xEV) requires electrification, component integration, downsized electronic control unit (ECUs), and quieter motors. In response, the new product contributes to downsizing of ECUs by integrating an MCU into the gate driver, and to quieter motors by using vector control.

Features of New Gate Driver IC

Specifically, the SmartMCD™ Series offers sensorless control gate driver IC for three-phase brushless DC motor (built-in charge pump circuit). Also, it integrates a 32-bit MCU (Arm® Cortex®-M0) with an operation frequency of 40MHz (built-in low-speed/high-speed oscillator). Also, it has built-in memory (Flash: 64Kbytes; ROM: 12Kbytes; RAM: 4Kbytes). Additionally, it includes a built-in vector engine and programmable motor driver and 1-shunt resistor current sense amplifier, 12-bit A/D converter, and 10-bit A/D converter. It offers various detection circuits, current limiter, over current, Vbat overvoltage, and over temperature. It adopts LIN and PWM communications selectable, UART as communications method. This gate driver IC is AEC-Q100 (Grade 0), automotive-electronic-component-certification qualified.

Note:

[1] Gate driver: A driver to drive MOSFETs

-01 April 2024-