C8051F850 Motor Control Reference Design

Silicon Labs' C8051F850 sensorless brushless DC (BLDC) motor control reference design offers a ready-to-use generator control solution with production-quality hardware and software for rapid evaluation and deployment in cost-sensitive applications. This reference design provides a complete system-level solution for sensorless brushless DC motors and serves as a tool for developers using the C8051F85x/6x product family to evaluate and adopt low-cost BLDC motor control solutions. The C8051F85x/6x family is an ideal MCU for this reference design, featuring a 12-bit analog-to-digital converter, a precision internal voltage reference, two analog comparators with programmable hysteresis and response time, and three independently configurable enhanced-resolution PWM channels with built-in hardware shutdown capability. Access to motor control source code helps accelerate design. Additionally, a motor control graphical user interface (Silicon Labs Spinner) enables real-time control and motor monitoring, providing flexibility and ease of use for controlling and understanding BLDC motor operation. A strong value proposition of the sensorless BLDC motor control reference design is its supporting environment of tools, development kits, software libraries, and accessories. The reference design includes everything needed to start an electric motor in less than five minutes.