Thursday, March 19, 2009

Switcher Design Without Tears

From an expert switching regulator designer :

I personally try to develop a model that starts as an averaged model and ends as a close as possible to the actual implementation of the switcher that I'm trying to design.

While Matlab is useful for quick checks, it is not as useful as VerilogA when it comes to actually designing the controller and doing model/circuit comparisons.
State-space averaging is a neat way to include a lot of variables into your model, but for a more simple and direct way refer to The Fundamentals of Power Electronics by Robert Erickson & Dragan Maksimovic. I strongly suggest that you read this book, especially the control section. It's tough to design a switcher without first having a good handle on the different loop dynamics. If you're working with other folks that are more senior in the area of power management, ask them to share you the very many other issues and hidden obstacles that exist along the way; they will bite you. These are too many to mention on this message.

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