New Industry Products

Highly-Compact Driver for Stepper Motors up to 3.5A RMS

December 03, 2018 by Paul Shepard

After the successful launch of the TMC5160 early 2018, TRINAMIC Motion Control now announces the TMC5161. This cDriver™ solution is an easy to use building block with a powerful integrated MOSFET driver stage and complete motion control features, including innovative current regulation.

“The TMC5161 combines our technological innovations successfully into a single device. Moreover, it achieves a new maximum for motor voltage and current specs in a monolithic motion controller with integrated MOSFETs,” explains Michael Randt, Founder and CEO of Trinamic.

“As always, ease of use was an important guideline for our designers, as well as cost efficiency. The result is an integrated IC that enables superior stepper motor control that offloads designers of the need for specialized motor control know-how,” Randt added.

Designed with ease of use in mind, the powerful chip can be set up and evaluated easily using Trinamic’s free, easy to use TMCL-IDE software and the modular evaluation kit. This not only minimizes development time, it also allows engineers to quickly try out different parameters for the optimal result, including Trinamic technologies that are in high demand such as SixPoint™ ramping, StealthChop2™, StallGuard2™, and more.

The cDriver™ covers a wide spectrum of applications from battery powered, high efficiency systems up to embedded applications, suited for robotics and industrial drives, textile, lab and office automation, medical drives, and next-generation desktop manufacturing applications. The complete solution reduces the learning curve to a minimum while giving the best performance in class.

Available from end of December at Trinamic’s distributors, the TMC5161 comes in a compact 10x10mm² aQFN package. The cDriver™ will also be offered as an evaluation kit and breakout board for quick evaluation and parameterization.

Summary of features and benefits:

  • 2-phase stepper motors up to 3.5A RMS coil current
  • 8 … 40V DC (55V peak)
  • Integrated 45mΩ MOSFETs – low RDSon for high efficiency
  • SPI & single wire UART
  • Step/Dir interface with 3D optimized interpolation MicroPlyer™
  • Motion controller with SixPoint™ ramp as intelligent peripheral
  • Encoder interface and 2x Ref.-Switch Input
  • 256 microsteps per full step
  • StealthChop2™, SpreadCycle™, DcStep™, StallGuard2™, and CoolStep™
  • Compact aQFN package sized 10x10mm