STMicroelectronics's L6208 Stepper Driver

I was looking up stepper driver chips today, and during a detour trying to find the l297/l298 combo from Mouser, I ran across this chip -

[www.st.com]

It actually looks like it might work better for driving my steppers than the 297/298 combo that I'm using now (since I ordered NEMA23's that are almost too overpowered for the driver boards).

Any thoughts? I like that its max current (2.8A) matches the steppers I got, and it also uses non-dissipative overcurrent protection which I assume means it doesn't get quite as hot as the current SMD combo does. In addition, it apparently has the diode array from the SMD1.2 board built into the chip - that could make the board a lot smaller without having to scrap and rebuy my entire soldering setup to do surface mount. Only downside I can see is that it does expect some cooling - by mounting it to a copper-clad board and using the board to cool it. Which also prevents you from using a socket on it, if you decide to go ahead and do that cooling.

So yeah, I was just wondering what everyone else thought.

... interesting - it could drive with microstepping too, when you apply two sine-waves at Vref.

For cooling you can solder a cooling block on top of the base-pins and fix a conventional heat-sink on the IC - and/or additionally enhance the cooling with a radiator ...

Viktor