A study of development of a dedicated control IC for a five phase stepper motor driver

Stepper motors are very well suited for positioning applications since they can achieve very good positional accuracy without complicated feedback loops associated with servo systems. In this paper, an intelligent five-phase stepping motor driver of business card size proposed. Constant current chopping technique was applied for the purposes of high torque, high velocity and high efficiency. The driver was designed to drive a middle-sized hybrid stepping motor with wire current rating from 0.4 to 1.5A. An up-to-dated translator of five-phase stepping motor was used to drive the gates of N- channel MOSFET array. The resolution in full/half mode is 0.72/0.36 degrees/step. Moreover, an automatic power down circuit was used to limit the power consuming as the motor stops. Additionally, a self-testing program embedded in a 80C31-CPU (PCL838) can self-test whether the driver is normal or not. This embedded program including linear acceleration and deceleration routines also can serve as a positioning controller. The dimension of this driver is approximate 70x65x35 millimeters, which is smaller than a business card. Experimental results demonstrate that the responses of the driver can reach 65 kilo pulses per second. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.