DRV835x Three-Phase Smart Gate Drivers

Texas Instruments' DRV835x devices are highly-integrated gate drivers that are designed for three-phase BLDC motor applications such as field-oriented controls (FOC), sinusoidal current controls, and trapezoidal current controls. The device variants provide optional integrated current shunt amps to support different motor-control schemes and a buck regulator to power the gate driver or external controller.

The DRV835x uses smart gate drive (SGD) architecture to decrease the number of external components that is typical for MOSFET slew rate control and protection circuits. The SGD architecture optimizes dead-time to prevent shoot-through conditions, provides flexibility in decreasing electromagnetic interference (EMI) by MOSFET slew rate control, and protects against gate short-circuit conditions through V_GS monitors. A strong gate pulldown circuit helps prevent unwanted dv/dt parasitic gate turn on events.

The various PWM control modes (6x, 3x, 1x, and independent) support simple interfacing to the external controller. These modes decrease the number of outputs required of the controller for the motor driver PWM control signals. The 1x PWM-mode is for simple sensored trapezoidal controls of BLDC motors by using an internal block commutation table.