STMicroelectronics New demo board helps advanced industrial and consumer electronics manufacturers accelerate dual motor design

     St's EVSPIN32G4-DUAL demo board controls two motors with a single, highly integrated motor driver, the STSPIN32G4, speeding up product development cycles, simplifying PCB board design, and reducing material costs.

     The EVSPIN32G4-DUAL circuit board can shorten the development cycle of advanced industrial equipment and consumer products such as robots, multi-axis factory automation systems, garden equipment, power tools, and shorten the time to market. The Arm® Cortex-M4 microcontroller (MCU) built into the STSPIN32G4 motor controller is able to control two motors simultaneously, performing complex algorithms such as vector control (FOC) in real time. In addition, MCU peripherals support FOC algorithms with or without sensors, as well as advanced rotor position detection and torque control algorithms, including motor control and universal timers, as well as analog devices such as operational amplifiers and comparators.

     The EVSPIN32G4-DUAL demo board uses an advanced three-phase gate driver inside the STSPIN32G4 and an external STDRIVE101 gate driver to control two three-phase inverters with a maximum output voltage of up to 74V and a maximum output current of 10A. Both gate drivers have their own bootstrap circuitry and safety protection features, including drain-source voltage monitoring, cross-on-prevention, multiple thermal protection mechanisms, and undervoltage lock protection (UVLO).

     The EVSPIN32G4-DUAL also utilizes the STSPIN32G4 built-in power management circuit to reduce design size, simplify bill of materials, reduce costs, and speed product assembly on the production line. Power management circuits include programmable buck converters and low-drop linear regulators that power the gate driver power supply VCC, as well as low-static current regulators that specifically power the MCU during standby.

     STSPIN32G4 belongs to the STM32 ecosystem. The ecosystem provides extensive and comprehensive development support for application developers, including project launch tools, middleware packages, and software samples. The X-Cub-MCSDK (Motor Control Software Development Kit) contains the motor control algorithm firmware library such as FOC and the STM32 motor control workbench. This is a very useful graphical interface application development tool, allowing users to directly select from the menu and automatically configure EVSPIN32G4-DUAL.