OmniVision announces brushless DC motor drive solutions for vehicles

OmniVision introduces a new brushless DC motor driver chip WXMD1705. The chip has features such as ultra-low static power consumption, wide input voltage range, drive and power stages can be powered independently, and supports a rich diagnosis and protection mechanism, providing a richer design choice for motor control of the body.

With the increasing demand for comfort and safety of modern vehicles, the motor plays an increasingly important role in the automobile electronic system. Generally speaking, the number of vehicle motors loaded by a single vehicle is about 30-40, and this figure can even reach 100-150 on new energy vehicles. In the future, with the development of vehicle electrification and intelligence, there is still considerable room for growth in the loading capacity of vehicle motors.In addition to high-power AC motors, automotive motors are mainly DC motors with a power range of several watts to several hundred watts. Dc motors are generally divided into two-phase DC brushed motors, three-phase DC brushless motors and stepper motors.

Among them, the DC brush motor uses mechanical commutation, through the intermittent contact of the commutator and the brush to form an alternating magnetic field, mainly used in the scene of relatively low speed and relatively large torque, such as Windows, doors, tail doors, sunroofs, electric seats, locks, parking systems, etc. Dc brush motor has become a kind of motor commonly used in automobiles because of its high cost performance and wide application scenarios.

The drive mode of DC brush motor has been evolving, and the electronic drive mode is gradually replacing the drive mode of traditional relays, mainly due to the following advantages of the electronic drive mode:

1. Electronic drive mode can achieve positive and negative rotation, speed can be adjusted;

2. Under the new domain controller architecture, the electronic drive mode can integrate multiple drivers into a chip, effectively reducing the occupied area of the PCB board;

3. The electronic drive mode integrates analog circuits such as op-amp and comparator, which can have more protection functions, including overcurrent, overvoltage, undervoltage, overtemperature, etc., greatly reducing the risk of damage to the driver itself and external load.

4. Electronic drive mode is more flexible in use, and different configurations through SPI or I2C can drive inductive and capacitive loads in addition to motors; 5. The electronic drive mode can support SPI diagnosis and report the current fault state to achieve higher functional safety requirements. Some of the more integrated motor driver chips also integrate the communication bus of CAN and LIN, directly forming a single-chip gate and seat control solution.