Melexis New version of Pump/Fan Driver ICs Pushes Lifetime Boundaries and Its Operating Temperature Up to 135℃

Dedicated automotive pump driver meets requirements for high ambient temperatures and long operating lifetime.

Tessenderlo, Belgium, 28 October 2021 - In order to address more challenging customer deployments, MELEXIS has expanded its MLX90412 product offering. The latest version of this 2.2A automotive-qualified pump/fan driver IC is optimized to deal with high ambient temperature levels and supports prolonged operational lifespans.

Melexis, a global microelectronics engineering company, introduces the MLX90412GLW single-coil pump/fan IC with integrated driver stage. It is intended for applications with high ambient temperature such as automotive water pumps. The MLX90412GLW drives pumps up to 15W in Internal Combustion Engines (ICE). This typically implies a maximum ambient operating temperature up to 135℃. While water pumps up to 20W can be driven within the maximum ambient temperature of 85℃ of electric vehicles (EV).

The MLX90412GLW is qualified to meet the increasing operating lifetime demand. This goes up to 15,000 hours of EV applications such as battery cooling.

The Pump/Fan Driver ICs MLX90412GLW, a dedicated automotive 1-coil motor driver, includes all state of the art protections. Hall-sensor based 1-coil water pumps are well known for their robust start-up performance.

With the MLX90412GLW, pump manufacturers can offer a complete portfolio of water pump solutions. It can be configured in a range of BLDC commutation options from sinewave mode, offering the lowest noise performance ideal for EVs over a high torque mode, up to a low EMI mode, for ON/OFF applications requiring minimum external EMI filter components.

Additionally the MLX90412GLW can operate basic two-wire pumps with ON/OFF functionality. It can also operate variable speed pumps through a PWM interface with diagnostics feedback in a four-wire pump. Finally it can be complemented with the Melexis MLX81113 LIN MCU gateway to realize three wire LIN-based water pumps.

The MLX90412GLW's high degree of integration requires a much smaller number of external components than in traditional solutions available on the market today. Prototyping goes fast with the user-friendly GUI that allows configuring all of the available options. The full development can be completed without the need for any motor control software, allowing fast validation and time to market with minimum engineering resources.

“We are proud to offer a versatile one-stop shop solution for a complete portfolio of 20W water pumps. It is also future-proof, meeting the challenging lifetime requirements, for instance for battery cooling in electrical vehicles”, explains Dirk Leman, Smart Drivers product line manager at Melexis. “This device saves space, lowers BOM costs and reduces development time.”