MOTIX Motor Gate Driver IC: Enabling Easy Migration from 12 V to 48 V Systems and Full Support of Functional Safety Requirements

­Infineon Technologies AG introduces the MOTIX™ TLE9140EQW gate driver IC for brushless DC motors targeting the demanding 24/48 V market. The TLE9140 is tailored for automotive motor control applications featuring higher voltage requirements from 24 V up to a maximum of 72 V, where higher system reliability and faster switching behavior are necessary. The IC is the ideal complement to Infineon's MOTIX MCU TLE987x and TLE989x 32-bit motor control SoC solutions but also suitable as 48 V BLDC driver with common MCUs on the market. Typical applications include pumps and fans, windshield wipers, the HVAC module, or e-compressors. In addition, the TLE9140 is applied as 3-phase motor gate driver for applications in commercial, construction, and agricultural vehicles as well as in light electric vehicles such as eBikes, eScooters or eMotorcycles.

“Our new motor gate driver IC allows customers to easily scale their existing 12 V MOTIX TLE987x and TLE989x motor control designs to 24 V or 48 V systems”, says Andreas Doll, Senior Vice President, and General Manager Smart Power at Infineon. "The TLE9140EQW enables the reuse of hardware and software designs, allowing our customers to shorten their time-to-market and optimize their development costs when moving to 24/48 V systems.”

The gate driver IC offers functional safety according to ISO 26262 ASIL B. It is housed in a small TS-DSO-32 package. The IC offers a high voltage capability up to 110 V, a gate driver capability of ~230 nC/MOSFET up to 20 kHz as well as SPI communication. It has an active low-side (LS) freewheeling function during V SM overvoltage (OV) and a wide range of important diagnostic and protection functions such as timeout-watchdog, drain-source monitoring, overvoltage, undervoltage, cross-current and over-temperature protection as well as off-state diagnostics.

In addition, the TLE9140 includes Infineon's patented gate shaping function, an adaptive MOSFET control that can compensate for fluctuations in the MOSFET parameters in the system. It automatically adjusts the gate current to achieve the desired switching behavior. This allows the system to be optimized in terms of electromagnetic emissions (EMI) by slower slew rates, while minimizing power dissipation through shorter dead times and shorter rise/fall times.

To accelerate the evaluation and design-in process, Infineon's MOTIX motor control ICs are accompanied by a wide range of software and tools. The TLE9140 evaluation board is user-friendly and enables rapid evaluation and prototyping. In addition, Infineon provides a configuration wizard and a device driver for the TLE9140 that provides a simple API for generating the control frames for the external bridge driver via SPI. Both are available free of charge.

Availability

The MOTIX™ TLE9140 motor gate driver is available now. More information is available here.