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Servo Controls and Applications, Global Silicon Control Engineering Group August 2003 Methods for Measuring Anti-Shock Performance, A Technical Description of the Active G-Shock System and its Application to Consumer Audio CD Portable Products.
Dr Jian Wang & Morgan Colmer Global Silicon R&D Labs, Cambridge, UK, CB8 7SG

1.0 Abstract
In the design and manufacture of portable CD (Compact Disc) products for the consumer audio market, a number of issues arise from the effects of external disturbances on the quality of the system. Often these issues are hard to quantity objectively and one is often required to resort to the subjective results of testing the overall perceived listening experience of the consumer. This is often difficult to reconcile with the rigid world of the servo control engineer where performance indices and measurements are the cornerstones of progress. This paper outlines a technique for measuring the overall effects of external disturbances upon the level of system performance and gives and example of a proprietary system design for achieving optimal shock insensitivity with performance indications.

controller at the correct point on the disc, when a disturbance causes a discontinuity in the data, the time taken to recover to the point in the data stream where the disturbance occurred will determine the amount of data buffer left in reserve. When the system is subjected to multiple shock events, this parameter can be very important. 2.1 Disc Speed Effects The time that the servo system will take to fill the buffer, when operated at a speed greater than real time, can be found by applying equation 1, where T f is the time taken to fill the buffer in seconds, Bm is the buffer size in bytes, r is the data compression ratio, Dnorm is the normal real-time data rate (in this case 176400 bytes per second) and d is the disc speed relative to the real-time speed.
Tf = Dnorm ( d 1) Bm r

2.0 Introduction
The terms used within industry for systems and techniques to improve the shock sensitivity vary, are for are G-Shock, Jog-resistant, AntiJog and ESP but for the purposes of this paper they are all considered to have the same common aims, i.e. that of reducing the sensitivity to external perturbations by state of the art servo control techniques. Some of these techniques make use of data buffering to allow the system controller to instruct the servo mechanism to re-read the data lost upon a shock event and in order to fill the buffer in real time applications, other systems will read the data into the buffer at speeds greater than that required by real time audio playback, and hence have a net surplus of data. These systems will invariably disable the servo controller, and hence the data, once the buffer has been filled. After a predetermined period of time (often optimised to save power on battery operated devices) the servo system will begin reading the data until the buffer is filled again. Another area that is often optimised to achieve a high level of shock protection is the time taken by the nonlinear servo controller to re-start the linear

(1)

Clearly, if

d becomes unity the equation will

blow up to infinity because of the term d 1 becoming zero. 2.2 Buffer Compression As with any consumer application, audio systems are cost sensitive and algorithmic techniques are often employed to increase the utilisation of the finite buffer memory. This comes at an expense of silicon area (or MIPS in the software implementation) and generally power consumption. There are a number of techniques available to designers of these type of systems but ADPCM (adaptive differential pulse code modulation) is almost exclusively used due to its relatively simple implementation and low impact upon the SNR of the audio signal. In cost sensitive applications, the quality reduction will be negligible for this lossy compression technique. Typical systems achieve 4:1 compression ratios using ADPCM, which for CD 16-bit PCM means that every audio sample is represented as a 4-bit binary code. Buffer compression techniques have become a very

 Global Silicon 2003 important method of increasing the apparent buffer size, which will add to the shock handling capability of a system. 2.3 Jog Recovery When any portable CD appliance is subjected to a large enough shock, the servo system will be caused to lose tracking and focus. The traditional techniques for shock protection make this assumption and then attempt to use the non-linear servo controller to get the system back on track as soon as possible, the more quickly a system can be brought back to the point in the data stream where the shock occurred, the less data will be expended from the data buffer. The time taken to recover to the correct point in the data stream will need to be averaged over a number of shock events to obtain the mean recovery time, generally represented as T . 2.4 Shock Resistance Not all external disturbances will cause the system to lose tracking and/or focus with the disc, any disturbance that is outside of the performance envelope of the linear servo controller will cause a jog event, and to be beyond the servo controllers capabilities means that the disturbance was beyond the loop bandwidth or exceeded the level afforded by the phase/gain margin of the controller. Given that the shock sensitivity is not constant with all servo controllers, a figure of merit can be extended to it and this quantity should be directly related to the external shock event. The mechanical shock experienced by a system can be expressed as the force exerted and the time over which it is exerted. It is also important to characterise the frequency range over which the force is applied. Generally, the quantity used to measure such events is expressed as G/ms, which represents the force (in G units) exerted in 1 ms of time in a sinusoidal force profile. The Peak G force exerted in this time/shape window is the figure denoted, usually defined by the unit g . All CD mechanisms have some kind of anti vibration mounting which has two properties (i) the peak amplitude of higher frequency disturbances is reduced and (ii) the bandwidth over which the disturbance is active is reduced. A typical anti-vibration mount has the transfer function given in equation 2, where H (s ) is the transfer function represented in the complex frequency plane, c is the natural frequency of the anti-vibration mount (to the -3dB gain point) and s is the complex frequency operator.

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H (s) =

c
s + wc

(2)

Generally, anti-vibration mounts have a first order transfer function, however there are cases when a 2nd order (mass-spring-damper) system is used to suppress high frequency disturbances which has a transfer function given in equation 3.
H (s) =

c 2 s 2 + 2 c + c 2

(3)

3.0 Overall Figure of Merit

With so many factors affecting the performance of a CD servo system when it is subject to a shock event. We have found that all three factors discussed in this paper are relevant, that of disc speed d , Jog recovery time T and servo shock resistance g . For the elements of

and g , the performance

is directly proportional whereas for the recovery time, the performance is inversely proportional, hence all three factors can be integrated into an overall figure of merit for the systems robustness to external shock events. Combining all of these factors into a product of these parameters yields equation 4, where is a dimensionless variable that represents the shock performance for a CD servo controller.

d g T

(4)

3.1 Worked Example Taking a typical CD servo controller (taken from Rohm datasheet) we can find the 3 key figures for the level of performance with respect to shock.

d = 2.3 T = 1sec g = 3G / ms
Which when applied to equation 4, gives a figure of merit of: -

d g T

= 6 .9

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Company Confidential the damping factor and m is the phase margin.

4.0 Active G-Sense Technology

The following is a technical description of the AGS (Active G-Sense) system used in the Xin servo controller software to improve the shock performance of the CD system. 4.1 Background A CD servo controller is a system that is used to keep the focus and tracking signals minimised to their zero mean point. These servo controllers have to reject extraneous signals coming from a number of sources, which include, non-centred disc (eccentricity and vertical deviation), disc defects and external shock events. The ability of the linear servo systems to cope with these effects is broadly governed by three factors, phase margin m , gain margin Gm and loop bandwidth n . The phase margin is a figure of merit that represents the difference in the phase at the open loop unity gain crossover point and 180 degrees, the point where the system becomes unstable. In typical CD servo controllers, the phase margin is usually in the 30 40 degrees region. It is a common misconception that a higher phase margin will always result in a better system, and although this is generally true, there are a number of important provisos to this rule. The systems gain margin is the amount of gain between the point where the open loop response dips below unity and where the phase reaches zero. This overhead gives the system a greater ability to cope with system tolerance and this figure is between 6 and 18 dB for typical servo controller systems. The loop bandwidth is the frequency at which the open loop gain response crosses unity. The higher this figure, the greater the range of disturbance frequencies the system can cope with. One problem with a loop bandwidth that is too high is that the system noise will not be rejected by the controller and be passed to the focus and tracking actuators as drive signals which will result in (i) poor quality data (ii) Audio noise on the servo actuators (iii) excessive power consumption. It is relatively simple to achieve either a high phase margin or a high loop bandwidth but to achieve both of these together is less than trivial. A high phase margin will add damping to the servo control response in the time domain according to equation 5, where is

4.2 Description

m
100

(5)

In any CD servo control system, there will be an optimum point where the control effort will balance a number of performance criteria, however this point will not necessarily be the point where the shock sensitivity is optimised. In fact it can easily be shown that in any CD servo system, factors such as phase margin will compete with shock sensitivity for the ideal system settings. Given this limitation, we can either set our system for maximum resistance to defects and disc imperfections or we can set it for ideal shock resistance. The Global Silicon G-Shock system utilised in the Xin processor uses patented technology (patent numbers GB101427, WO202376, US208990, US208991, CN208992, IN208993 and EP208994), which allows for both shock resistance and good playability. At the heart of this system is a shock detection system that senses any external disturbances and prevents any disc defects from giving false trigger events and then adjusts the loop gain to increase the loop bandwidth for the duration of the shock event. This allows the Global Silicon servo controller to achieve both good playability of disc defects and ideal shock sensitivity. The diagram below (figure 1) shows how the shock detector will control the servo to a higher gain upon detecting a shock event. When the shock is within the frequency range of a band-pass filter (typically from 100 Hz to 2 KHz) the shock detector will trigger if the level of the disturbance is above a preprogrammed threshold. The gain (Ks) will typically be switched to a higher gain of between 6 and 12 dB, depending upon the headroom determined by the gain margin.

Figure 1

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4.3 Summary

Based upon the figure of merit given by equation 4, we can determine the system's performance with the use of the G-sense system. Remembering that the figure of merit can be expressed as:

d g T

We can calculate figure of merit for the Active G-Shock system. First the figures for the Global Silicon servo controller need to be obtained, these are: -

d = 1.5 T = 1sec g = 5G / ms
This then yields a figure of merit of

= 7.5
Clearly, adding the Active G-Shock system allows the Global Silicon Xin controller to have superior anti-shock performance at lower disc speeds, which give better all-round disc playability. Perhaps the key enabling technology behind the Global Silicon Active G-Shock system is the fact that the servo controller is completely software driven. Software can be rapidly adapted to solve new challenges in the CD player as they arise. Despite the CD system being a very old technology, it is constantly evolving to cope with the constantly reducing quality of commercial CDs. In the age of the consumer being able to by a CD-R for less than $0.10, the quality of the discs available is now far below the specification drawn up by Philips in the 1970s. With CD-R and CD-RW discs becoming commonplace this trend looks likely to continue and the benefits of a software servo controller will continue to keep Global Silicon ahead of competition.

5.0 The Authors

Dr Jian Wang is a senior engineer with Global Silicon Ltd. and heads the servo controls group. Morgan Colmer is CTO for Global Silicon Ltd.