STEVAL-VNH5180A offers dedicated power stage and controls suitable for electric DC motor driving. This evaluation board comes pre-assembled with VNH5180A H-bridge belonging to the VNH Motor Driver series based on VIPower^®proprietary technology. A typical application is the door lock.

This evaluation board consists of a motherboard (STM8 Universal Board) and a daughterboard.

The motherboard, based on STM8 microcontroller, provides the logic section for monitoring and driving the VNH5180A assembled in the daughterboard.

With the aim to make simpler the board usage and settings, ST provides a dedicated and user-friendly software with a Graphic User Interface (GUI). This enables the user to set VNH5180A parameters (PWM, Motor direction…) and at the same time it shows real time device diagnostic information like current output evolution, battery voltage monitoring, board temperature and much more.

• Handling up to 8 A of maximum motor current output
• Undervoltage shutdown
• Overvoltage clamp
• Device thermal protection
• Cross-conduction protection
• Current and power limitation
• Very low standby power consumption
• Programmable PWM operation (up to 20 kHz)
• Protection against loss of ground and loss of V_CC
• Motor current monitoring (thanks to VNH5180A current sense output)
• Device output protected against short to ground and short to V_CC
• Graphic User Interface (GUI)