The AEK-MOT-WINH92 evaluation board key objective is to drive a DC motor for car window lifters, ensuring high safety levels.
This board perfectly fits in the automotive market trend, which goes towards the evolution of the window lift application, offering a new anti-pinch mechanism without leveraging on motor encoders but exploiting the board three different types of current sensing (in-line, low-side and high-side).
The board can be configured to work with a single H-bridge for a bidirectional DC motor or two independent half-bridges for two unidirectional DC motors.
Thanks to its compact size, the board can be connected to any microcontroller easily, exploiting separate and dedicated connectors for SPI communication , current sensing, and basic motor commands interface with fault detection capabilities. Another key feature is the adjustable gain for anti-pinch and for fulfilling any of the car window operative conditions (the current range levels could change when opening the window with adverse weather conditions, for example in case of ice).
The board also offers three diagnostic features to detect potential short-to-ground, short-to-battery, and open load conditions when the device is in the off state.
In case of failures, the DIAG pin alerts the external MCU, ensuring a prompt intervention in case of open-load, short-to-ground, and short-to-battery, thermal warning and overtemperature shutdown, under/overvoltage and overcurrent protection. For system debugging during the development phase, a fail-safe button was added to the board layout.
To allow the board robust protection and prevent damage due to the inversion of the power supply polarity, reverse polarity protection has been implemented.
Four external MOSFETs allow current flowing up to 50 A, in line with the board power dissipation capabilities.
The board design is based on the L99H92 H-bridge gate driver for automotive applications, which features flexible current sensing to offer different tools for advanced anti-pinching algorithm development. For systems requiring a higher safety level, you can enable a watchdog with configurable time window.
The AutoDevkit ecosystem offers a wide range of demos and drivers for the SPC58 microcontroller to facilitate your application design by rapidly jumping to the board usage:
1) The SPC582Bxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Test application for discovery, to be downloaded on the SPC582B hosted on the AEK-MCU-C1MLIT1 MCU board;
2) The SPC584Bxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Test application for discovery, to be downloaded on the SPC584B hosted on the SPC584B-DIS discovery board;
3) The SPC58ECxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Full Bridge Test application, to be downloaded on the SPC58EC hosted on the AEK-MCU-C4MLIT1 MCU board;
4) The SPC58ECxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Dual Half Bridge Test application, to be downloaded on the SPC58EC hosted on the AEK-MCU-C4MLIT1 MCU board;
5) The SPC58xNxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Test application for discovery, available in AutoDevKit Studio for reference;
6) The SPC58ECxx_RLA - AEK_MOT_WINH92 Window Lift Test application, to be downloaded on the SPC58EC hosted on the AEK-MCU-C4MLIT1 MCU board.
The first five demos show how to configure the AEK-MOT-WINH92 to drive one bidirectional (full bridge configuration ) or two unidirectional (half-bridge configuration, for example for oil and water pumps) DC motors, varying a PWM duty cycle signal.
The last demo shows how to configure the AEK-MOT-WINH92 for window lift applications.
