Until recently, motor control designers who wished to take advantage of the brushless DC motor’s unique attributes were faced with a difficult task. There were no control ICs designed to decode data coming from Hall effect sensors, let alone perform all the ancillary functions such as forward/reverse selection, overcurrent shutdown, undervoltage lockout, overtemperature shutdown, and so forth. Using discrete components to include these functions was an alternative, but discretes often consumed far too much circuit board area, especially if the control unit was to be placed inside the motor housing.