Abstract
A HDD adopts a sensorless brushless DC (BLDC) motor as a spindle motor. Because there is no direct sensor measuring rotor position. open loop commutations with inductive sensing are used to increase the rotor speed up to a certain speed where the zero crossings of the back electromotive force (EMF) voltage are measurable. Therefore, successful open loop commutations are necessary for the stable start-up control of the spindle motors. In this paper, the time scale and the number of the open loop commutations are employed for design parameters to guarantee robustness to torque constant variation and initial rotor position. The design results are verified by experiments on a very low current start-up of the spindle motor with various environment. The experimental results show that the design results can decrease the start-up failure rate considerably.