Optical reliability improvements for low cost brushless DC motor controllers on FPGA

To take full advantage of the high reliability of brushless DC motors (BLDCMs), an electronic control unit with equally high reliability is mandatory. In this paper, a solution is proposed for cost and reliability drawbacks associated with integrated BLDCM controllers by using reconfigurable technology to implement control logic. An embedded DSP design for FPGAs is presented that is able to drive BLDCMs using a minimum of external components and implementing optic coupling between logic and power electronics. Secondly, the reliability of the proposed implementation is compared to the performance of commercial BLDCM controllers.