More than Drivers in Motor Drives: Closing the Loop

Abstract

This paper presents the problematic associated to the design of a complete motor drive, exposing all available and missing blocks at this moment. We proceed by dividing the power drive into basic functions – control, different power supplies, isolated communication, controller interfacing, current monitoring – and we present for each of these functions an implementation example. Implementation examples shown are based on high-temperature X-REL parts such as XTR26020 Isolated Intelligent Gate Driver, XTR40010 Isolated Two Channel Transceiver, XTR30010 PWM Controller, XTR70010 and XTR70020 Low-dropout Linear Regulators and XTR50010 Bidirectional Multichannel Level Translator. A drive solution based on the XTR26020, presented for the first time in this paper, is explained and compared against previous art. Main characteristics of the new linear regulator XTR70020 are presented, showing the best-in-class dropout voltage, which outperforms the closest competitor by a factor of three. For all parts featured, tests results at an ambient temperature up to 230°C (even higher in some cases) are presented.