Title
4.1 A 3-phase digitally controlled DC-DC converter with 88% ripple reduced 1-cycle phase adding/dropping scheme and 28% power saving CT/DT hybrid current control
Abstract
Multiphase DC-DC converters are essential to provide good efficiency over a wide range of load current, especially for today's multicore SoCs, which usually have a wide range of current profile. Active-phase-count (APC) control, as proposed in [1-3], is the key technique that offers the wide load range, and dynamically adjusts the number of phases according to load conditions. However, an APC transition induces a voltage disturbance due to current redistribution among phases. This makes the APC control only suitable for a voltage regulator with large output capacitors beyond 1000μF, or with high switching frequency beyond 10MHz [4] that hardly delivers more than 2A current with a good efficiency. To mitigate the disturbance impact, [2] has proposed adding or dropping a phase slowly, to allow the PID control to gradually redistribute the phase currents. However, the load current may change direction spontaneously before the completion of the transition, leading to deterioration in the transient response. This paper presents a fast APC scheme which performs the transition within 1 switching cycle, and only requires 66μF capacitors to limit the voltage ripple within 10mV, an 88% ripple reduction with respect to the optimal PID-only control. The proposed APC scheme utilizes digital phase current data, which is also needed to determine the optimal phase count [1-3]. However, the A/D conversions consume 3mW, which is 28% of the total power consumption. A continuous-time/discrete-time (CT/DT) hybrid current control architecture is introduced to eliminate the 3mW penalty while producing A/D converted data by time sharing of the analog circuitry in the control loop. Moreover, a fast transient response configuration is designed, offering less than 40mV fluctuation during an 8A load transition and less than 5mV fluctuation during a 2V line transition.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ISSCC.2014.6757345
Solid-State Circuits Conference Digest of Technical Papers
Keywords
DocType
ISSN
dc-dc power convertors,analogue-digital conversion,continuous time systems,digital control,discrete time systems,multiprocessing systems,phase control,system-on-chip,three-term control,transient response,voltage regulators,a/d conversion,apc control,ct/dt hybrid current control,pid control,active-phase-count control,capacitance 66 muf,continuous-time/discrete-time hybrid current control,current 8 a,current profile,current redistribution,digitally controlled dc-dc converter,fast transient response,high switching frequency,large output capacitors,load current,multicore soc,multiphase dc-dc converters,power 3 mw,total power consumption,voltage 2 v,voltage disturbance,voltage regulator,system on chip
Conference
0193-6530
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.62
1
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chen Kong Teh1394.66
atsushi suzuki230.62
manabu yamada330.62
mototsugu hamada430.62
Yasuo Unekawa5325.89