DirectDrive: Well, it certainly looks nice...

I finished soldering up the first prototype of DirectDrive, my new higher-power three-phase controller. Without a doubt I can say it's certainly the nicest looking controller I've made, to date. But if history is any indicator, it is most likely doomed to failure like almost all of my other v1.0 controllers. The only real question is: Will it be some fundamental design flaw, a layout problem, noise issues, or a fiery death?. Or all of the above? Well, 

In the last post I mentioned that the ACNW-3190 gate drivers I wanted to use were in fact not the package I thought they were, and so I went back to the HCPL-3120, my standard high-current gate drive solution since Cap Kart. They have "only" 2.5A of gate drive, though, which is a bit weak for driving four of the DirectFETs. Using 20Ω gate resistors, the switching waveforms looked like this:

The trace that starts high is the Vds. The trace that starts low is Vgs.

I learned a lot about MOSFET switching characteristics, including that the length of the Miller plateau depends on the voltage across the MOSFET. So to test the true switching time, I applied 36V across the FET and measured both the gate voltage and the drain-to-source voltage. The switching time, where the FET is dissipating the most power, begins when the gate voltage reaches the threshold voltage (about 3V) and ends after the Miller charge is satisfied. I measured this to be about 290ns. That's right in line with what I would predict, but my initial calculations suggested that these switching losses would make 50V/200A operation very difficult to achieve. So, I am trying out 10Ω gate resistors:

Wow, that's ugly.

While it's definitely shorter, down to about 110ns, the switching waveforms have much more ringing now. The gate drive traces are fairly long and wander around to get out from under the DirectFETs and bus capacitors. I was definitely worried about the inductance, and here's a clear example of why it helps to put the gate drivers as close as possible to the FETs. The good news is that this was measured up by the TVS diodes that "protect" the gate:

Measuring right at the gate instead reveals a moderately cleaner signal:

As ugly as it is, I've seen worse, and I'm tempted for now to just leave the 10Ω gate resistors in for the rest of the testing phase. On to the next problem!

After I tested a collection of low-side FETs, I attempted to get one full half-bridge up and running. In doing so, I was temporarily stopped by another issue that I swear I've had to solve on several occasions in past motor controller projects. The problem is that the HCPL-3120 gate drivers have a very unforgiving undervoltage lock-out that will shut down the output if the gate drive supply voltage drops below 11V. This isn't a problem for the low-side, which is fed directly by the 15V switching supply. But the high side is bootstrapped and as it turns out, I needed a bigger bootstrap cap to keep the high side on. So, I switched to 4.7μF and the problem went away. With the half-bridges working properly, I finished soldering the rest of the board.

I discovered the first real board flaw when none of my gate drives would turn on, despite all three channels of PWM being active. I've used a hex inverter (74xx04) before to generate the complementary PWM signals, but I guess I forgot that the 74LS series doesn't work on 3.3V. So I'll have to get some 74HCs. In the mean time, I'm not above little-blue-wire hacks:

Little yellow wire...whatever.

I also soldered a current sensor in upside down, but nevermind that. After a few minor fixes, everything seems to be up and running. The tiny temperature sensor and phase current sensors both provide stable zero outputs and the three phases do what they should in response to PWM signals. Moving on to light load testing...

It's a light load, I swear.

Cap Kart's SepEx motor has a 1.3Ω field winding that makes a terrific power resistor. It's big enough to not get hot for a while and it has an assload of inductance, so the current going into it will be smooth at any reasonably PWM frequency. However, for some reason, it has killed a number of controllers in its lifetime, including a Victor HV. So I was a little nervous about hooking it up, but it seemed like the best light-load option.

Mainly, I was looking to test the through-the-board Hall effect current sensors. (If the FETs have issues with this ~20A load, then I'd be pretty much screwed.) The good news is that both current sensors produce a repeatable, stable, and clean output and can resolve current to better than 1A. The range is about +/-80A as configured by copper braid jumpers on the bottom of the board. The bad news is that the current measurements are disappointingly coupled...

Through the magic ways of Gilbert Strang, I was able to produce this coupling coefficient matrix which shows just how bad it is. The lowercase i is the sensor reading and the uppercase I is the actual phase or DC current. The coefficients show how much of each component of actual current winds up coupling into the sensed current on phase A and C. It's not all bad news: the 14.1 and -13.4 make perfect sense (lol) given the  gains I expected and the fact that one current sensor is "upside down". The cross-coupling on the C phase is not terrible; it picks up a bit of A and a bit of DC. But the coupling from phase C onto the A sensor (the -10.5 value) is really bad. It means that the A sensor is picking up almost as much C phase current as A phase current. Physically, this all makes some sense: All the wires pass over the A sensor, while the C sensor sits sort-of off to the side. But it's very not good for current control...

So, the options I am now considering:

1. Presumably if I can find a coupling matrix, I can find a decoupling matrix to recover the true currents from the sensor readings. This is a horrible idea that I will probably try out of morbid curiosity.
2. Re-routing the wires to come straight off the board instead of passing sideways over the phase A sensor. This is a quick fix that might minimize the coupling, but it's not space efficient and I probably wouldn't be satisfied even if it got rid of a lot of the coupling.
3. Returning to the ACS714 current sensor and using the back of the board to create an epic bypass shunt to change it from a +/-30A sensor to a +/-200A sensor. It's still a Hall effect sensor, but with an internal conductor and measurement, so the coupling should be much less of a problem. This is the solution I am leaning towards.
4. Switching to a shunt resistor measurement. I don't really want to think about the isolation issues, but it would be the most accurate. The other problem with small shunts for 200A is they will have very low voltage drops and be hard to amplify.

So I'll have to do a v1.1 to implement a more permanent fix for the current sensing. But in the mean time, Option 2 will probably allow me to continue testing with this board, and I won't feel as bad if I destroy it under heavy load testing. More to come.