NuAxiSemiconductor trade intelligence

STMicroelectronics’ 600V three-phase gate drivers combine flexibility, precision, and protection

What happened

STMicroelectronics has extended its STDRIVE family of three-phase gate drivers with two new 600V devices, the STDRIVE631P and STDRIVE631N, which let motor drives and inverters operate directly from a high-voltage bus. The two devices integrate three half-bridge drivers for N-channel power MOSFETs or IGBTs in a compact SO-28 package, targeting applications such as fans, pumps, and compressors for white goods. Leveraging ST's advanced BCD6-OFFLINE technology for robustness to below-ground spikes up to 100V, both devices feature outputs capable of sourcing 1.0A and sinking 0.85A, an integrated zero-drop bootstrap diode on each output, and matched propagation delays across all channels. The STDRIVE631P uses positive (active-high) input logic while the STDRIVE631N uses negative (active-low) logic. Protection includes an integrated comparator with smart shutdown for faults such as overcurrent and overtemperature, interlocking and deadtime control to prevent cross conduction, and under-voltage lock-out (UVLO) for both low-side and high-side driving sections. The devices aim to minimize the bill of materials, simplify PCB layout, and reduce overall system size; integrated bootstrap diodes eliminate external high-side supply components, and the overcurrent protection and UVLO provide significant savings compared with discrete gate-drive solutions. Each device has a dedicated input pin per channel and a dedicated enable pin for entering low-power shutdown mode. The EVLSTDRIVE631P and EVLSTDRIVE631N evaluation boards are also available, each containing a complete three-phase inverter built with STGD6M65DF2 IGBTs, featuring selectable single- or three-shunt current sensing and interfacing with STM32 microcontrollers through a 34-pin motor-control connector for fast development of field-oriented control (FOC) or six-step control. STDRIVE631x devices provide ±50V/ns of dV/dt transient immunity and are protected against ESD events of up to 2kV (HBM).