TIDUF82B August 2024 – May 2025 DRV8162 , INA241A , ISOM8710
Many low-voltage, three-phase inverters for DC-fed motor drives are powered by a 24V to 60V DC rail. When looking at robotics systems, the motors often have different power ratings typically at 200W, 400W, 750W, 1.5kW, and 2.5kW, or even higher occasionally, depending on the functions to implement. These motors have different requirements on the current rating of the motor drives.
This design supports motors from 1.5kW to 4kW with a 48V DC input. The rated output current can be about 32ARMS to 85ARMS; and in some occasions can reach up to around 100ARMS.
In designing this kind of power stage, high efficiency is a key target. With high efficiency, a small PCB size can be achieved, and the driver can be fit into the shell of an integrated motor drive system, where the power stage can only use the shell as heat sink for thermal dissipation.
To achieve a small PCB size in this design, the smart gate driver DRV8162L helps a lot with the integrated protection functions against power stage shoot-through, over current, and short circuit faults. A VGS handshake with dead time insertion can be enabled to prevent shoot-through from happening.
To optimize system efficiency and EMI performance, the DRV8162L adds the ability to program output source and sink currents without adding any external circuitry.
To enable the drive to control motor at the highest efficiency, in-phase shunt-based current sensing is adopted in phase A and phase B using the INA241A, a high common-mode rejection, zero-drift featured current sense amplifier. Due to the high gain of the amplifier, a 0.2mΩ shunt is used to support a linear sense range of ±165A. The low resistance shunt selection also contributes to the high efficiency of the system. In phase C, a functional isolated delta-sigma modulator AMC0106M05 is used with a 0.3mΩ shunt resistor to sense the current. Working with a digital sinc three decimation filter in the MCU, the linear current measurement range reaches ±167A.
Additional feedback includes the DC-bus voltage and the pulse width modulation (PWM) filtered three-phase voltages to allow validation of advanced sensorless control like the InstaSPIN-FOC™ motor.
Designing the system to be able to stop the motor safely and prevent any unexpected start-ups are critical requirements for robotics and factory automation applications. To assist these system level requirements and achieve the so-called Safe Torque Off (STO) function, this reference design proposes various combinations of shutdown paths for the gate drivers to prevent the motor from unexpected power up.