Brushless motors of the same horsepower as their brush counterparts are smaller and lighter. With the brushless vs brush motor comparison, the most noted difference is the familiar brush-commutator arrangement that has been at the heart of single-phase DC brush motors for more than a century. Because they lack this brush-commutator interface, brushless motors exhibit lower acoustic noise; are virtually maintenance free; and a brushless motor will exhibit a longer life cycle. As recently as 2004, brushless motors were considered to be significantly more expensive than brush motors. At the time of this writing in 2008, brushless motors have benefited from a decrease in cost so that today, the price differential is as little as a 10% when shopped against an equivalent brush motor. With the acceptance of brushless motors now in rapid expansion, designers now turn their focus to the availability, or rather the lack thereof, driver ICs that work in tandum with motor control circuitry. From the Apex Precision Power product family at Cirrus Logic, the SA306-IHZ is a fully-integrated switching amplifier designed specifically to drive three-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motors. Three independent half bridges, each comprising a P-FET and a N-FET in a configuration, provide more than 15 amps of PEAK output current under digital control. Thermal, short circuit monitoring, and a unique cycle-by-cycle current limit function are all provided, which generates fault signals for the microcontroller to take appropriate action.

With shrinking cost constraints and growing performance expectations, embedded designs need to deliver ever smaller and more cost-effective solutions into a wide range of end products. Quickly and easily selecting appropriate components and sub-systems with confidence is essential for reliably delivering smaller and more cost-effective solutions. To accomplish this, you need fast, intelligent results from intuitive test and measurement tools. 

This application note covers three actual applications in which specific measurement techniques are used to more efficiently select and identify appropriate components and sub-systems for embedded designs. Find out how intuitive test and measurement tools can help you make quick and informed choices.

DSP algorithms are traditionally implemented using DSP chips, FPGAs, or RISC processors. While these solutions are efficient, they only perform one function and can be both expensive and large. This note discusses an alternative solution using an MCU to implement DSP algorithms in less space and still have CPU bandwidth available for other tasks.

Driven by the need for untethered mobility and ease of use, many systems rely on rechargeable batteries as their primary power source. The battery charger is typically implemented using a fixed-function IC to control the charging current/voltage profile. Silicon Labs provides a flexible alternative to fixed-function linear battery chargers.

This application note shows how to convert a standard high-speed digital isolator to a bidirectional I2C isolator. In addition to being compatible with digital isolators, the circuit is simpler than previously published solutions, completely insensitive to bus capacitance, and can easily support the standard 400 kHz maximum I2C bus rate.

Real-time clocks are used in many embedded applications to record the time at which an event occurred, a pressure sensor was activated, or an ADC reading was taken, for example. This Application Note provides an example of how to add a real-time clock (RTC) feature to a C8051Fxxx device. Example software is included.

With a market size estimated at more than $650M and more than 1.4B crystal oscillators supplied annually, quartz crystal oscillators have long been the preferred choice for clock generation in consumer, computing, and communication applications. Quartz oscillators are available in a wide range of frequencies, package sizes, and stabilities.

Pre-emphasis and equalization are increasingly popular solutions to signal integrity problems caused by lossy backplane channels at high signaling rates, for example in Backplane Ethernet 10GBASE-KR. We show how pre-emphasis and equalization can be used to counteract channel loss. We examine how pre-emphasis affects test and measurement with examples from popular standards and look at some practical examples of pre-emphasis and equalization filters across a high speed backplane.

Circuit designers are faced with the challenge of developing systems with increasing functionality and complexity while under demanding power and time-to-market constraints. Such systems often require voltage level translation devices to allow interfacing between integrated circuit devices built from different process technologies. The choice of the proper voltage level translation device depends on many factors and will affect the performance and efficiency of the circuit application. Texas Instruments offers a variety of solutions to meet customer requirements.

Analog switches are extensively used for switching audio signals in battery-powered applications, such as mobile phones. In many cases, the switch is powered directly from the battery, but it receives control signals from a lower voltage processor GPIO. For most analog switches, this application condition leads to an excess supply current draw that catches system designers by surprise. This application report explains the cause of this excess current consumption and describes solutions to address it effectively.