8 2005 Semtech Corp. www.semtech.com
PRELIMINARYPOWER MANAGEMENT
SC2434
Applications Information (Cont.)
Program The Controller
Please refer to Fig. 1 and the application schematics in
this data sheet for the discussion. The resistor from pin
10 to ground, ROSC, programs the switching frequency . The
resistor from pin 11 to ground, RDAC, sets the DAC current
step size. The resistors, RFB, ROS , and RDRP set the DAC
step size, the output voltage set point, and the droop,
respectively.
MathCAD programs are available to calculate the required
parameters upon request.
Programming The Switching Frequency
The oscillator frequency can be selected first by setting the
value of ROSC as given below:
IDAC_LSB 1
16
Vbg
RDAC
.
RFB VIDstep
IDAC_LSB
The per phase switching frequency is 1/3 of the oscilla-
tor frequency in three-phase mode. It is recommended
that per phase switching frequency is 200~300KHz for
good trade off of efficiency vs. transient responses.
Programming The DAC Step Size
The SC2434 allows programming of the output voltage
and the DAC step size by selecting external resistors. The
LSB of the DAC current is given by:
where Vbg is the trimmed voltage reference (Vbg = 1.5V)
and RDAC is the resistor from pin 11 to ground. For the
given VID step size (25mV for VRM9.0 and VRM9.2 speci-
fications), the feedback resistor can be calculated accord-
ing to the LSB of DAC current:
The above two equations are for choosing RDAC and RFB
simultaneously . The advantage of this method is that new
VID step size can be accommodated by modifying external
components while maintaining the required precision.
Choose Current Sensing Resist or According To The
Threshold Of OCP
The SC2434 controller has an over current protection (OCP)
threshold of 120mV. The normal practice is to let the
peak voltage across the sensing resistor corresponding to
full-load operation be 75% of the given OCP threshold:
Rdrp RFB Rsense
.
Gca
.
∆
Vout
∆
Iout
Nphase
.
where Ipeak is the peak current of the output inductor . Since
the choice of sensing resistor values are limited, typically 3
mOhm, 4 mOhm, or 5 mOhm, it is recommended to choose
the sensing resistor with a bigger value than that was cal-
culated, and to use a resistive divider to get the equiva-
lent Rsense value. The two attenuation resistors should
have value of 20 Ohm in parallel. A filter capacitor of
1 0nF is also needed to be acr oss the OC+ and OC- pins of
the controller IC. Please refer the application circuit sche-
matic.
Programming The Dynamic (Active) Droop
T o optimize transient responses, the SC2434 actively regu-
lates output voltage as a function of output current. At
zero current the output is positioned to the upper limit of
the regulation window. As the load increases, the output
“droops” towards the lower limit. This makes optimum
use of the output voltage error band, yielding minimum
output capacitor size and cost.
The droop is adjusted by setting the DC gain of the error
amplifier. This is done by choosing the resistor from the
ERROUT pin to the FB pin (RDRP) of the controller. While
the optimum value of RDRP ma y be derived e xperimentally,
the following equation can provide the first order calcula-
tion for given droop slope:
where Rsense is the current sensing resistance after taken
into account of attenuation, and Gca is the gain of the
current amplifier while Nphase is number of phases being
used.
Any output interconnection impedance not within the feed-
back loop can contribute to additional drooping. This ef-
fect has to be taken into account. Usually, when testing
the regulation at different CPU pins, the results may var y
slightly by same token.
It is important to use surface mount current sensing resis-
tor to minimize the parasitic inductance for accurate cor-
relation between the above equation and the test results.
This is because the inductive contribution, which may also
sense 75% "120m
I peak