JAJSUL1A May 2024 – July 2024 DRV8161 , DRV8162
ADVANCE INFORMATION
The DRV816x devices are integrated 100-V gate drivers for various electromechanical loads including brushless DC (BLDC) motors, brushed DC motors, stepper motors, switched reluctance motors, and solenoids. These devices reduce system component count, cost, and complexity by integrating half-bridge gate drivers with a trickle charge pump, bootstrap diode, and FET VDS monitoring. The FET VDS monitors protect the external FETs against shorts to the supply, to ground, or across motor terminals. The DRV8161 integrates a bidirectional low-side current sense amplifier for current feedback to the controller ADC. The half-bridge architecture allows for the gate driver to be placed near the power stage FETs to simplify signal routing, reduce radiated EMI, and reduce overall PCB area.
The gate drivers support external N-channel high-side and low-side power MOSFETs and can drive up to 1-A source, 2-A sink peak currents. The integrated bootstrap diode, external bootstrap capacitor, and integrated trickle charge pump generate the high-side gate drive supply voltage from the GVDD pin. The GVDD pin directly supplies the low-side gate drive supply voltage. The DRV8162 and DRV8162L device variants offer separate GVDD and GVDD_LS pins to help the system design of safe torque off (STO).
A smart gate-drive architecture provides the ability to adjust the output gate-drive current strength allowing for the gate driver to control the power MOSFET VDS switching speed. This allows for the removal of external gate drive resistors and diodes reducing BOM component count, cost, and PCB area. The architecture also uses an internal state machine to protect against gate-drive short-circuit events, control the half-bridge dead time, and protect against dV/dt parasitic turn on of the external power MOSFET.
In addition to the high level of device integration, the DRV816x devices provide a wide range of integrated protection features. These features include power-supply under voltage lockout (UVLO), VDS over current monitoring (OCP), and over temperature shutdown (OTSD). The nFAULT pin indicates fault events detected by the protection features.