Evaluating High Reliability SMD-0.5 MOSFETs With LX7720 Spacecraft Motor Drivers

As space system developers continually work to reduce the size, weight and power of key modules and elements, they also require higher-performance, radiation-hardened and radiation-tolerant components that enhance system designs. New technology—such as lighter, more highly integrated motor control circuits for satellites—can withstand extreme space environments and optimize spacecraft performance.

The LX7720 spacecraft motor driver is radiation hardened by design. It’s a companion Integrated Circuit (IC) to a space Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) such as Microchip’s RTG4™ FPGA and RT PolarFire^® FPGA, or a space microcontroller (MCU) such as Microchip’s SAMRH71F20 or SAMRH707F18. The integrated current sensing, resolver, encoder and Hall effect encoder interfaces in the LX7720 reduce board space and weight while increasing reliability for closed-loop motor control using coil current feedback and rotor position sensing.