STMicroelectronics has added four new devices namely 250V STSPIN32F0251 and STSPIN32F0252, and 600V STSPIN32F0601 and STSPIN32F0602 in its STSPIN32F0 motor-control system-in-package family. Combining three-phase gate drivers and an STM32F0 Arm Cortex-M0 microcontroller, the devices ensure to simplify high-voltage Brushless DC (BLDC) motor drives. Thus, designing of mains-powered home appliances and industrial equipment including corded power tools, drives, pumps, fans, and compressors is simplified too.
The popular control algorithms and application examples including single-shunt, three-shunt field-oriented control (FOC), traditional sensored single-shunt and 6-step sensorless control are provided too. The devices are pin-compatible which makes hardware and firmware to be reused in products for 110 V AC and 250 V AC operations. The standby mode of ICs helps in minimizing power consumption in idle conditions.
The bootstrap diodes and protection circuitry including cross-conduction prevention and deadtime insertion are integrated into gate drivers. Besides, there is UVLO on both the lower and upper driving sections which prevent the power switches from operating in low-efficiency or dangerous conditions. Moreover, these have a patented fast-acting smart ShutDown (smartSD) function for overload and overcurrent protection.
With integrated 48MHz STM32F0 MCU, the rich STM32 development ecosystem can be used to build various applications. While 4 KByte SRAM and 32 KByte Flash provide data and code storage, analog and digital peripherals include a 12-bit ADC with up to 10 channels, six general-purpose timers, 21 general-purpose I/O (GPIO) pins, and I2C, UART, and SPI ports. The integrated bootloader permits flexible device-lifecycle management as firmware updates can be applied in the field.
There are four inverter evaluation boards that are fully compatible with X-CUBE-MCSDK (motor control software development kit), starting from 5.4.1 version. These tools simplify the development of drives leveraging single-shunt and three-shunt control. The 600V EVSPIN32F0601S1, EVSPIN32F0601S3, EVSPIN32F0602S1, and 250V EVSPIN32F0251S1 have a power-supply stage and a populated MOSFET output stage with dual-footprint flexibility that makes replacing the devices provided with alternative MOSFETs or IGBTs in DPAK or PowerFlat packages easy. Using standard STM32 tools detachable STLINK‑debugger configuration and firmware debugging becomes possible. Besides, there are single-wire debug (SWD) and UART connectors available. The four devices are packaged as 10 mm x 10 mm TQFP devices and are available from at the price of $1.84 to $2.09 for orders of 1000 pieces.
