Trinamic TMC6140-LA three-phase MOSFET gate driver

Trinamic Motion Control, now part of Maxim Integrated Products, has introduced the fully integrated TMC6140-LA three-phase MOSFET gate driver to maximise the battery life of brushless direct current (DC) motor drives. The MOSFET gate driver is designed to integrate all three bottom shunt amplifiers to provide a complete motor drive solution with 30% improved power efficiency, while simplifying design by reducing component count by half when compared to similar solutions.

The product is optimised for performance over a wide voltage range, making it suitable for servo motors, brushless motors and permanent magnet synchronous motors. The three-phase gate driver is equipped with pins to add a charge pump, statically stabilising the gate voltages of external MOSFETs in three-phase motors with up to 100 A of coil current. Offered in a 36-pin quad-flat no-leads (QFN) package, the gate driver is a flexible solution offering 0.5 or 1 A gate driver current for 5 to 30 VDC battery-powered applications, such as power tools where voltages can drop below 10 V. Integrated current sense and diagnostics features add functional safety while simplifying design.

For applications at 15 V or lower, the switching regulator output can be used to stabilise the power supply, which maintains the output signals for consistent operation over an extended battery life. The integrated shunt amplifiers provide current sensing for status information, while an analog programmable short detection and diagnostic output reports status back to the host. The integrated current sense and diagnostics features are key for enabling functional safety without adding complicated circuitry or additional components to the system’s design.