IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 55, NO. 4, APRIL 2008 1501
High-Bandwidth Multisampled Digitally Controlled
DC–DC Converters Using Ripple Compensation
Luca Corradini, Student Member, IEEE, Paolo Mattavelli, Member, IEEE,
Elisabetta Tedeschi, Student Member, IEEE, and Daniele Trevisan, Student Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper investigates multisampled digitally con-
trolled switched-mode power supplies with switching ripple com-
pensation. In digital controllers for power converters, the main
bandwidth limitations come from A/D conversion time, compu-
tational delays, and small-signal delay of the digital pulsewidth
modulator (DPWM). In hard-wired digital-controller technolo-
gies, such as in dedicated digital IC and/or in field-programmable
gate arrays (FPGAs), the calculation delays can be made negligi-
ble with respect to the switching period; thus, when fast ADCs
are used, the overall phase lag is dominated by the DPWM.
The multisampling approach can strongly reduce the DPWM
delay, thus breaking the bandwidth limitations of conventional
single-sampled solutions. In this paper, the additional aliasing
effects, which would require a filtering action, are avoided, exploit-
ing the periodic nature of the switching ripple under steady-state
conditions using a repetitive-based filtering action. Simulation and
experimental results on a 1.2-V–10-A 500-kHz synchronous buck
converter, where the digital control has been implemented in the
FPGA, confirm the properties of the proposed solution.
Index Terms—DC–DC converters, digital control, field-
programmable gate array (FPGA), oversampling.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T
HERE IS a growing interest in hard-wired digital control
applied to high-frequency switched-mode power supplies
(SMPS) both from scientific and industrial points of view
[1]–[3], mainly with the aim of realizing dedicated integrated
digital controllers (IDCs). In fact, IDCs offer several potential
advantages compared with their analog counterparts, such as
immunity to component variations and ability to implement
sophisticated control schemes. On the other hand, the practical
application of IDCs is still an open issue in the industrial com-
munity, since one of the limiting factors of these technologies
is the achievement of dynamic performances comparable to
those of analog controllers in the presence of nonidealities,
such as control delays and quantization effects, while keeping
a simple control architecture with low silicon area require-
Manuscript received June 30, 2006; revised September 13, 2007.
L. Corradini is with the Department of Information Engineering, University
of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy (e-mail: luca.corradini@dei.unipd.it).
P. Mattavelli and E. Tedeschi are with the Department of Technology and
Management of Industrial Systems, University of Padova, 36100 Vicenza, Italy
(e-mail: mattavelli@ieee.org; tedeschi@ieee.org).
D. Trevisan is with the Power Electronic Laboratory, Department of Elec-
trical, Mechanical and Management Engineering, University of Udine, 33100
Udine, Italy (e-mail: daniele.trevisan@uniud.it).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2008.917144
ments as imposed by the cost/complexity constraints in high-
frequency SMPS in consumer, portable, computing, or net-
working applications.
With respect to the pulsewidth modulators (PWMs) com-
monly employed in analog control solutions, sampled PWMs
adopted in digital control schemes introduce an intrinsic delay
time in the feedback loop [4]–[6], the entity of which limits
the achievable system bandwidth. Such a delay represents the
main source of bandwidth limitation when A/D conversion
time and control processing time are negligible with respect
to the switching period. This scenario is possible in the case
of hard-wired digital controllers, such as field-programmable
gate arrays (FPGAs) or application-specific integrated circuits,
where the control execution time can be reduced to a small
fraction of the modulation period [1]–[3].
In conventional control architectures [1]–[3], [5], [6], a single
sampling of the converter state variables is performed for
each modulation period. In the case of fast A/D converters
and dedicated hard-wired control logic, there is no additional
cost in increasing the sampling frequency and the control-
law frequency update with respect to the switching frequency.
Thus, there is a recent deeper attention concerning the so-called
multisampling techniques [7], [8] since they are very promising
in reducing the PWM phase lag and ultimately breaking the
bandwidth limitation.
Besides these positive features, the multisampling technique
has a major drawback since it injects high-frequency distur-
bances (i.e., the voltage ripple) into the feedback loop. Once
processed by the proportional-integral (PI) or PI-derivative
(PID) regulators, these disturbances propagate through the
feedback loop, causing malfunctions in the closed-loop system
operation. For this reason, high-frequency ripple cancellation is
required. The most straightforward approach is the antialiasing
filter which, however, reduces the phase margin and the possible
advantages of the multisampling technique.
This paper investigates a ripple-elimination technique which
does not waste the phase boost achieved through the multi-
sampling approach. The proposed solution exploits the periodic
nature of the high-frequency disturbances under analysis and
adopts a repetitive-ripple-estimation approach to subtract the
noise from the sampled error signal. The repetitive control
solution, being a feedback technique, needs no preliminary
knowledge of converter parameters.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the
small-signal modeling and the discrete-time representation of
the multisampled digital control. Section III analyzes the ripple-
removal algorithm, and Section IV presents some simulation
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