DRV8306: Can BLDC gate driver support single phase motor application

Vincent,

Yes the DRV8306 can support both 3 phase and single phase operation but some extra care has to be taken.

Three phase is the normal use case and is well documented in the datasheet.

The single phase case is the more tricky one. For single phase we will actually be using two of the three phase outputs (confusing I know). I am assuming the single phase motor has a single hall output. This hall output we will connect to one of the three phase outputs. For the other two phase hall inputs we need the INVERSE of the single motor phase hall. This will allow the commutation to switch between two different orientations as the single phase rotates through the cycle. The customer can either use a GPIO to invert the two hall inputs that are not coming from the motor. Looking at the commutation table, based on which input the customer selects, they should use the two matching commutation states from the marked up table below:

As you can see, assuming one hall input comes from the motor itself, the other two hall inputs are inverted and the same. The following state pairs should be used 1 and 4, 2 and 5, or 3 and 6.

Regards,

-Adam