Predictive tracking adc for inductor current sensing in a pwm controller
AssigneeRenesas Electronics America Inc.
InventorsTravis GUTHRIE, Narendra KAYATHI
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Abstract
According to certain aspects, a predictive tracking scheme is provided for sampling inductor currents in a digital PWM controller used for high-bandwidth voltage regulation. In one or more embodiments, the predicted current derived from the PWM waveform is fed forward to the current sense ADC in order to reduce the required conversion range. These and other embodiments only need to convert a few of the LSB of the ADC in order to correct the largest error expected in the synthesizer.
Claims15
An apparatus for sampling signals in a power controller, comprising:
- an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) configured to sample an input signal, the input signal being associated with a sense signal from an output stage in the power controller;
- a synthesizer that predicts a value of the sense signal based on information about a pulse width modulation (PWM) waveform provided to the output stage;
- a filter that subtracts the predicted value of the sense signal from the sense signal to produce the input signal for the ADC;
- and
- a combiner that combines an output of the ADC with a representation of a portion of the predicted value of the sense signal to produce a measured value of the sense signal.
A method for sampling signals in a power controller, comprising:
- producing a digital sample of an input signal, the input signal being associated with a sense signal from an output stage in the power controller;
- predicting a value of the sense signal based on information about a pulse width modulation (PWM) waveform provided to the output stage;
- subtracting the predicted value of the sense signal from the sense signal to produce the input signal;
- and
- combining the digital sample with a representation of a portion of the predicted value of the sense signal to produce a measured value of the sense signal.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.