Design of an integrated analog controller for a Class-D Audio Amplifier

An integrated analog controller for a self-oscillating class-D audio power amplifier is designed in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology for a 3.3 Volt power supply. It is intended to be used with an external output stage and passive filter, for medium power applications of upto a few 100 Watts. The controller was optimized with regard to its loop gain to suppress the distortion of the output stage. In typical commercially available output stages, the distortion is dominated by dead time effects and the THD can be as low as 20 dB. The controller uses self-oscillation to generate the carrier. To control the self-oscillation a second order phase shift network is embedded in the loop. To increase the loop gain a fifth-order loop filter is added. For a switching frequency of 400kHz the controller achieves a loop gain of 51 dB, nearly flat over the audio band. For reasons of flexibility, the order of the controller is made programmable, as well as the dead time and the delay in the loop. Full spice simulations of the controller combined with an external 120 Watt output stage indicate that a THD of upto 80 dB (better than 0.01%) can be obtained even under the worst case condition of a dead time of 50 ns

Analyzing distortion in ASDMs with loop delay

Recently nearly exact expressions for the distortion in a commonly used family of Pulse Width Modulators (PWMs) known as Asynchronous Sigma Delta Modulators (ASDMs) were presented. Such an ASDM consists of a feedback loop with a schmitt-trigger (or a comparator), and a continuous time loop filter. However these previous results are not yet practically applicable because the effect of unavoidable loop delay (e.g. in the schmitt trigger) was not taken into account. Therefore we now present a more general theory that is also valid when there is a nonzero loop delay. A comparison of the resulting equations with computer simulations demonstrated a very good matching, confirming the validness of the theory. This way, a designer can now easily understand the relationship between the loop filter dynamics and the linearity of an ASDM

A describing function study of saturated quantization and its application to the stability analysis of multi-bit sigma delta modulators

Just as their single-bit counterparts, multi-bit sigma delta modulators exhibit nonlinear behavior due to the presence of the quantizer in the loop. In the multi-bit case this is caused by the fact that any quantizer has a limited output range and hence gives an implicit saturation effect. Due to this, any multi-bit modulator is prone to modulator overloading. Unfortunately, until now, designers had to rely on extensive time-domain simulations to predict the overloading level, because there is no adequate analytical theory to model this effect. In this work, we have developed such an analytical theory based on multiple input describing function analysis. This way, we obtained expressions for the signal gain, the noise gain and the variance of the quantization noise. Here, both the case of DC as well as sinusoidal signals was considered. These results were used for the stability analysis of multi-bit Sigma Delta modulators, which allows to predict the overloading level. Code implementing the proposed expressions is available for download at http://cas1.elis.ugent. be/cas/en/download

Digital bilinear feedback for low-power double-sampling sigma-delta modulators

A novel double-sampling (DS) technique for use in sigma-delta modulators (Sigma Delta Ms) is presented. The proposed technique uses a digital bilinear filter in the feedback path of the modulator loop. The bilinear filter suppresses the quantisation noise folding (QNF) that results from the DS path mismatch. Unlike other solutions for the QNF, the digital implementation of this filter allows the sharing of the input sampling capacitor with the feedback sampling capacitor without any additional analogue gain stages. This way, the power consumption in the input signal buffer can be greatly reduced, because it benefits from the nullator effect at the input of the Sigma Delta M loop, and hence the current needed to drive the shared sampling capacitor is drastically reduced. Moreover, the proposed DS technique is also suitable for a single-ended circuit implementation of DS

A 8 mW 72 dB Sigma Delta-modulator ADC with 2.4 MHz BW in 130 nm CMOS

A double-sampling sigma delta-ADC with bilinear integrators and a 7-level quantizer is presented. It achieves third order noise shaping with a second order modulator through quantization noise-coupling. The modulator is integrated in a 130 nm CMOS technology. For a clock frequency of 48 MHz and an oversampling ratio of 20 (2.4 MHz signal bandwidth), it achieves 72 dB DR and 68 dB SNR. The prototype consumes 8 mW from a 1.2 V voltage supply

Calibration of DAC mismatch errors in sigma delta ADCs based on a sine-wave measurement

We present an offline calibration procedure to correct the nonlinearity due element mismatch in the digital-to-analog converter (DAC) of a multibit Sigma Delta-modulation A/D converter. The calibration uses a single measurement on a sinusoidal input signal, from which the DAC errors can be estimated. The main quality of the calibration method is that it can be implemented completely in the digital domain (or in software) and does not intervene in any way in the analog modulator circuit. This way, the technique is a powerful tool for verifying and debugging designs. Due to the simplicity of the method, it may be also a viable approach for factory calibration

Improved offline calibration for DAC mismatch in low OSR Sigma Delta ADCs with distributed feedback

We present an offline calibration method to correct the non-linearity due to DAC element mismatch in distributed feedback SigmaDelta-modulation A/D-converters. The improvement over previous methods is that not only the first feedback DAC is calibrated, but also the DACs that are coupled to later stages can be calibrated as well. This is needed in the case of Sigma Delta modulators with a low OSR, where the contribution of the second feedback DAC should not be neglected. The technique is based on a calibration measurement with a two-tone input signal

A very compact 1MS/s Nyquist-rate A/D-converter with 12 effective bits

We present a very compact analog-to-digital convertor (ADC) for use as a standard cell. To achieve an inherent accuracy of at least 12-bits without trimming or calibration, extended counting A/D-conversion is used. Here, the circuit performs a conversion by passing through two modes of operation: first it works as a 1st-order incremental convertor and then it is reconfigured to operate as a conventional algorithmic converter. This way, we obtain a Nyquist-rate converter that requires only 1 operational amplifier and achieves 12-bit accuracy performance in 13 clock cycles with 9 bit capacitor matching. The circuit is designed in 0.18 mu m CMOS with a thick oxide option. The resulting analog core occupies a chip area of only 0.011 mm2 and the complete digital control and reconstruction logic (including additional test features and storage registers) is 0.02 mm2. The analog blocks of the circuit consume 1.2mW and the digital 0.4mW. At a sample rate of 1 MS/s, the peak SNDR is 74.5dB and the dynamic range is 78dB, constant over the Nyquist band. The worst-case integral non-lineairity (INL) is within plus or minus 0.55 LSB

Validation of symbolic expressions in circuit analysis e-learning

Symbolic circuit analysis is a cornerstone of electrical engineering education. Solving a suitable set of selected problems is essential to developing professional skills in the field. Anew method is presented for automatic validation of circuit equations representing a student's intermediate steps in the solving process. Providing this immediate feedback may strongly enhance the training effects. The new method was embedded in a Web-based e-learning system and has proved to be useful in circuit analysis training, both at an introductory level and for more advanced problems in analog electronics