A Flexible Approach for Inductive Load Driver in Automotive Application

The current automotive IC sector counts hundreds of different systems, standard products or ASICs, for the inductive load drivers application. Many of them, such injector drivers, DC/brushless motor drivers, solenoid drivers, are designed to work in a specific operating mode, with fixed architecture and parameters. Since the need of different applications increases, a flexible approach to the design is mandatory. The state of the art offers only software-oriented systems to overcome these problems, which require embedded MCU. In this paper, an alternative system design for inductive load driver is proposed. It is based on an optimized and flexible architecture. With this flexible approach, it is possible to implement most of the topology scheme with regulation feedback and a programmable solution for shaping the current waveform into the loads.