Semiconductor Components Industries, LLC

Powervation Limited

Rohm Powervation Limited

Basil Almukhtar

Karl Rinne

Paul Kelleher

Paul Jay Harriman

Eamon O'Malley

Elaine Sheridan

A multi-phase power converter includes a digital ramp pulse modulation controller, a digital constant on-time controller, and a driver stage. The digital ramp pulse modulation controller provides a trigger ramp signal in response to an error signal when the multi-phase power converter is not in a green mode, wherein at least a portion of the digital ramp pulse modulation controller is inactive in the green mode. The digital constant on-time controller provides on-time thresholds and off-time thresholds when the multi-phase power converter is in the green mode. The driver stage provides a plurality of drive signals to a corresponding plurality of power stages in response to the trigger ramp signal when the multi-phase power converter is not in the green mode and to the on-time thresholds and the off-time thresholds when the multi-phase power converter is in the green mode.

Low power green mode for multi-phase power converters

The present application relates to power converters, particularly switch mode power converters sharing a load in which the converters are operated to share stresses between them. The application provides a controller () in which a stress share control loop () is provided to ensure the associated converter is operating at an average stress. The stress share control loop has a proportional and an integral term in its feedback path. The integral term may be enabled or disabled. In use, the integral term is enabled in all but one controller.

Digital stress sharing control loops for point of load converters

A method and apparatus for estimating capacitor current in a feed-forward control system includes a circuit that conducts a current through an output capacitor to ground and estimates a current magnitude for the current in an output current estimator. The current estimator generates a voltage that corresponds to the estimated current magnitude by creating a voltage drop across an estimator circuit capacitor that equals a voltage drop across the output capacitor, by creating a voltage drop across an output of an RC network of the estimator circuit that equals or is proportional to a voltage drop across the output capacitor due to parasitic inductance and parasitic resistance of the output capacitor. The voltage drop across the output of the RC network of the estimator circuit is proportional to current flowing through the parasitic inductance and resistance of the output capacitor.

Feed-forward control system with current estimator

The present disclosure is directed generally to switch mode power supplies operating in a master-slave configuration and provides a method of synchronizing the PWM outputs from the master and slave devices to avoid problems such, for example, as the generation of beat frequencies.

Growing community of inventors

Limerick, Ireland

Basil Almukhtar