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Toshiba and MIKROE collaborate to develop extension board
9th April 2025
Caitlin Gittins
Toshiba has collaborated with MIKROE to develop Clicker 4 Inverter Shield 2, the latest addition to the Clicker 4 series of extension boards.
The enhanced inverter shield has been designed to allow for convenient evaluation of Toshiba’s recently released TB67Z833SFTG gate driver for three-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motors in consumer and industrial applications.
Toshiba’s TB67Z833SFTG includes a built-in circuit with the ability to drive three phases of high-side and low-side N-channel MOSFETs. It also supports adjustable source (10mA to 1A peak) and sink current (20mA to 2A peak), depending on ambient temperature and power supply voltage. This gate driver has the capability to operate from supply voltages (VM) ranging from 8V to 75V. This combination of wide operating voltages and currents makes the TB67Z833SFTG suitable for a wide range of use cases.
The devices of this IC family feature either SPI or hardware control interface for quick and easy configuration, while its low standby current (1µA max) helps to extend the time duration between recharges for battery-driven applications. For safety, it includes integrated undervoltage lockout and thermal shutdown protection features, while gate drive abnormality detection and overcurrent protection functions improve overall system reliability by protecting the external MOSFETs.
Furthermore, Toshiba has adapted the current measurement circuitry on Clicker 4 Inverter Shield 2 to deliver an improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which can be optimised by reducing the maximum output current. Also featuring on this extension board is Toshiba’s TC75W58 dual comparator, which can operate from a single voltage source with low current consumption (20μA typ.). Clicker 4 Inverter Shield 2 is based on Toshiba’s 100V SSM6K819R low RDS(ON) power MOSFETs, which address the growing demand for highly efficient MOSFETs in smaller package sizes.
A combination of the MIKROE Clicker 4 Inverter Shield 2 and the MIKROE Clicker 4 development board for Toshiba’s M4K microcontroller (MCU) presents a convenient and cost-effective solution for experimenting with various consumer and industrial 3-phase brushless DC (BLDC) motor control applications.
The Clicker 4 Inverter Shield 2 is supported by the recently updated MCU Motor Studio software 4.0, now featuring a free-run digital storage oscilloscope for extensive real-time parameter logging and caters to all bare-metal configurations. In addition, it introduces Shift-2 PWM support, enhancing precision in vector engine-based hardware control.
