Hi Owen,
That’s a great question, and I wonder about it myself sometimes. The products which are now all in the Brushless-DC motor driver organization came from several separate product groups originally. You can expect some major deviations & oddities from the “norm”.
DRV8301/2/3 (60V) are all part of the same family and are some of the oldest gate driver parts we have. They were followed by the automotive DRV8305-Q1 (45V) and then the DRV832x (60V), DRV834x (automotive 60V), and DRV835x (100V) families. DRV8304 was thrown into the mix along the way as a lower voltage version of DRV832x. DRV8300 is the most recent (and basic) device we have in the gate drivers.
The DRV831x range has been reserved for integrated MOSFET devices (at least until we run out of part numbers) except for DRV8332 which was inexplicably named long ago.
We decided (around the DRV832x timeframe) to name parts with a serial interface (normally “S”) and devices with a hardware interface (normally “H”). For example the DRV8323S and DRV8323H are the same except for the interface. The DRV8316 is similar except we use “T” and “R” so we can reserve the “H” and “S” for upcoming variants of the device.
Outside of DRV8x, there are Functional Safety Capable devices (DRV3x) as well as devices with integrated control (DRV10x), but they are more application specific devices.
We tried to design the BLDC product page filters to be as useful as possible with the correct “lingo” to make it easy to filter to what you want. Do let me know if this page is unclear.
Thanks,
Matt