Brushed motor control

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A brushed motor is an easy-to-drive, low-cost DC motor often driven by batteries. The electric motor uses brushes to provide power to an armature coil sitting between permanent magnets that create the magnetic field. The current through the brush to the coil drives the rotor and is used for motors up to a horsepower. As the armature rotates, the stationary brushes come into contact with different sections of the rotating commutator and so wear out over time.

Brushed DC motor

Brushed DC motor are commonly used in industrial and automotive applications such as robots, valves and healthcare equipment. When only one direction of rotation is required, a single switch topology with PWM modulation can be used to vary the voltag

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Universal motor

Universal motors can be used with AC or DC supplies and are commonly used in consumer appliances such as mixers, fans and vacuum cleaners. Most universal motors are unidirectional. Bidirectional motors using two coils on the stator can be driven by a

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Brushed motors working principles

Brushed motors generally operate at low speed and can be driven by a simple pulse width modulation (PWM) controller to vary the voltage supplied to the motor to control the speed in one direction and provide the torque for the motor drive. If a bidirectional motor drive is needed, for example for an electric car window or as a servo in an industrial automation application, an H-bridge can be used alongside the PWM controller.

For low power applications, the motor control is integrated into the motor along with embedded gate drivers, power transistors, protection functions, current sensing and even DC-DC converters.

For high power applications, discrete low-voltage power MOSFETs and gate drivers are used separately to the motor to implement the H-bridge.

Using the brush reduces the lifetime of the motor. A brushless motor in comparison has a significantly longer lifetime and more controllability.

Our products and solutions

We offer the entire range of power semiconductors and ICs including discrete IGBTs and power MOSFETs as well as power modules and intelligent power modules (IPM), high-voltage gate drivers, powerful STM32 microcontrollers and highly integrated STSPIN drivers.

We have also developed a complete ecosystem with a range of evaluation boards, reference designs, firmware and development tools to help simplify and accelerate the design cycle.