CONVERTER

Capacitor choice is key in buck converter design

By Josh Mandelcorn Group Technical Staff Texas Instruments

Traditional power-supply design practices place much emphasis on the selection and placement of the output capacitor to meet tight ripple and noise requirements. Customers are willing to spend money for high-performance parts, but its the often ignored input capacitor that by far is more critical for a successful buck design. Its high-frequency characteristics and placement will determine the designs success or failure. Theres actually more latitude in selecting and placing the output capacitor. Even to meet output noise requirements, selecting and placing the input capacitor can be more critical. The stresses associated with the input capacitors are greater than those associated with the output capacitors in two areas. The input capacitor will see a higher rate of change in current, making both placement and selection critical to limiting voltage stresses on the main switches, and limiting noise propagated through the system. Also, its higher root mean squared (RMS) current stress and potential component heating makes its selection more critical to overall reliability. Rapid rate of change The first area of stress is the rapid rate of change of current, or dI/ dT, which shows up as a voltage across any internal or stray inductance. This can put excessive voltage stress on switches or clamp diodes operating off the input capacitor and radiate high-frequency noise into the system. The input capacitor sees a square wave of current going from zero when the high side

Figure 1: Schematic of tested model. Ceramic models for both input and output.

buck switch is off, to about fullload current when the switch is on. The current rise times of modern MOSFETs, and in turn in the bypass capacitor, are on the order of 5 ns. Its this rapid rate of current change (dI/dT), multiplied by the total stray inductance (L) that creates voltage spikes on the buck switches. On the other hand, the output cap sees a current waveform smoothed by the output choke and is limited to the peak-to-peak current in the choke. Generally, output choke ripple currents are limited by design to 40 per cent or less of the full-load current. For a buck operating at 500kHz and at 10 per cent duty cycle, this means a rise in current of 40 per cent of load current in 200 ns. Thats 100 per cent in 5 ns vs. 40 per cent in 200 ns represents a 100 times greater rate of current change and, in turn, voltage across a given inductance. For designs with higher duty cycles or lower ripple currents in output choke, this ratio can be much greater than 100. RMS current in capacitor The second area of stress is RMS current, which when squared and multiplied by the equivalent series resistance (ESR) of the affected capacitor, results in heating. Excessive heating can reduce component lifetime and even trigger a catastrophic failure.

Figure 2: Resultant ripple on output capacitor at 13 V input and 6 A load (5 mV/DIV).

The RMS current in input caps equals load current times the square root of (D*(1-D)), where D is the duty cycle of the buck switch. For a 5-V input and 1.2-V output, D is about one-fourth, and RMS current is 43 per cent output current. For a 12-V input and a 1-V output with synchronous rectification, D is about one-tenth and RMS current is 30 per cent of output current. On the other hand, the output capacitor current, which is sawtooth in shape, has an RMS current equal to the inductors peak-to-peak ripple current divided by 12. For a buck design with an inductor peak-to-peak ripple current set to 40 per cent of the load current, the RMS current in output capacitor will be only 12 per cent of the output current, or 2.5 times less than that in input capacitor.

Capacitor inductance, ESR Popular sizes of surface-mount ceramics vary from 0603 through 1210 (metric 1608 through 3225). Per an AVX application note, inductances are generally about 1 nH. For chip-type tantalum and electrolytics in the popular 2917 (metric 7343) size, inductances are about 4 to 7 nH. Lead geometry plays a major role in this. The ESR of ceramic capacitors for size 1210 with a voltage rating of 6.3 to 16-V are about 1 to 2 m. Chip-type tantalums have a typical ESR range from 50 to 150 m. This sets the maximum RMS current allowed to prevent excessive heating. While a size 1210 ceramic capacitor can handle 3 A RMS, the best Tantalum size 1210 can only handle about 0.5 A, and in the larger 2917 size, its about 1.7 A. Recently, a multi-anode version of the tantalum capacitors is avail-

eetindia.com | EE Times-India

able that reduces its inductance and resistance by half. Design considerations The circuit shown in the design example (Figure 1) considers a circuit with an input voltage of 1.2 to 12 V at 6 A. It employs a controller (TPS40190) running at 300kHz. Customer priorities are low cost and a simple bill-of-materials (BOM). A given standard is 22-F, 16-V ceramic caps in the 1210 package for both input and output caps. These caps can handle 3 A RMS with minimal heating. For input caps, the customer generally isnt concerned with voltage ripple, only that the current not be excessive. The worst case occurs when the input voltage is at its 5-V minimum, and the duty cycle is Vout / Vin or 0.25. The RMS current is Iout(D (1D)) or 2.6 A. The output ripple voltage is designed to be less than 20 mV peak-to-peak (pp). The output inductor value is chosen to be 2.2 H to limit the peak-to-peak ripple current to 1.8A, or 30% of full load. The output ripple voltage (Vpp) for low ESR and inductance output capacitors is the peak-to-peak current (Ipp) divided by the output capacitance (Cout) times 2 times the switching frequency(F) or Vpp = Ipp/(2FCout). Assuming a capacitance of 80% of nominal value for Vout to account for the 20% tolerance, three capacitors are required. Testing highlights The peak-to-peak input ripple voltage is about 200 mV (Figure 3), or 10 times greater than the output ripple voltage (Figure 2). If three input capacitors are used

instead of one, the input ripple voltage will still be more than three times the output ripple voltage. For customers requiring the input ripple voltage to be well under 100 mV, as a system noise concern, three input capacitors will be required. Also, the input voltage waveform has a much sharper sawtooth shape than the nearly sinusoidal output ripple. Hence, it will be much richer in high-frequency harmonics. Because ripple requirements are typically standardised with a 20MHz bandwidth measurement setting, the effects of the stray inductance in the capacitors is not fully seen. Main power switches When the 22-F ceramic input capacitor is replaced with a 470-F aluminium electrolytic capacitor, the peak voltage stress on Q4 in Figure 1 increases from 26 V to 29 V, just barely below its 30-V rating. Also, the converters efficiency dropped from 85.4 per cent to 83.1 per cent due to an additional 234 mW of losses in the input capacitors ESR. When a single 22-F ceramic capacitor is used, but moved 0.5 in. (1.2 cm) away from the power switches, the same increase in peak switch voltage is seen, but not the drop in efficiency. On a similar design with a different customer, significant noise spikes (up to 80 mV) are seen on the output. By adding a 22-F capacitor very close to main switches these spikes are eliminated. Layout guidance Figure 4 shows an example of a nearly optimised layout, in which input bypass capacitors C1 and

Figure 3: Resultant ripple on input capacitor at 13 V input and 6 A load (50 mV/DIV).

Figure 4: Optimised main switches and input capacitor placement to minimise stray inductance .

C2 (each size 1206) bridge the drain of high side Q1 and the source of low side Q2 (each size SO-8 with large metal drain pad). Its essential that a low-inductance bypass capacitor be located adjacent to the main buck power switches (or the switch and clamp diode for a non-synchronous converter) to reduce component stress and high-frequency noise. Surface-mount ceramic capacitors

fit this requirement best. The exact location of the output capacitor and its series inductance is much less critical than that of the input capacitor. In boost converters, the roles of input and outputs capacitors are reversed due to inductive smoothing of input current and large switching currents in the output capacitor.

eetindia.com | EE Times-India