Electronics Weekly
Called EVSPIN32G4-DUAL, it is built around the company’s STSPIN32G4 motor control system-in-package (9x9mm VFQFPN).
Inside that is a 170MHz 32bit Arm Cortex-M4 MCU die (STM32G431) that includes a hardware CORDIC accelerator for trigonometric calculations, alongside a gate driver die that can sink or source 1A for an external three-phase mosfet bridge.
This can only drive one of the motors, so the second motor’s three-phase mosfet bridge is driven at up to 600mA by an external driver IC (STDRIVE101 – 4x4mm VFQPN), controlled by PWM signals from the same MCU.
The microcontroller has the “processing power to manage both motors simultaneously”, said ST. “The board allows sensor-less operation with single-shunt current sensing taking advantage of operational amplifiers inside STSPIN32G4, as well as sensor-based control algorithms thanks to dedicated inputs for each motor among Hall sensors, quadrature encoder or absolute encoder with SSI communication interface.”
A motor control software development kit (X-CUBE-MCSDK) has firmware libraries for algorithms including field-oriented control and “a graphical tool that lets the user select and automatically configure the EVSPIN32G4-DUAL directly from a menu”, said ST.
Industrial and consumer applications are foreseen for circuits developed using the board, in robots, multi-axis factory automation, garden equipment and power tools.
