An Optimal Digital Pulse-Width-Modulated Dither Technique to Enhance the Resolution of High-Frequency Power Converters

Wide bandgap semiconductor switches have been increasingly utilized to improve the power density and efficiency of power converters, as such devices are able to operate at very high frequencies, e.g., up to 100 MHz, with reduced power losses. However, such a high-frequency operation may impose a challenge to the digital control system, and the system clock frequency should be up to 100 GHz in high-precision applications, which is difficult to realize in low-cost microprocessors. Instead of using extremely high-frequency clocks, preprocessing-based solutions that utilize digital pulse-width-modulated (DPWM) dither techniques can also enhance the DPWM resolution with moderate frequency clocks. Unfortunately, this is usually achieved at the expense of introducing low-frequency harmonics, which may complicate system controller and output filter design. In this paper, an optimal dither technique is proposed to enhance the resolution of DPWM power converters. The concepts of positive dither and negative dither are first proposed in this paper. Furthermore, vector-diagram-based analysis indicates that with proper utilization of positive dithers and negative dithers and carefully selected dither sequences, the lowest order harmonic introduced by the conventional dither technique can be completely eliminated when the dither period is multiples of six switching periods. In other cases, the proposed optimal dither technique can produce minimized lowest order harmonic. Finally, experimental results obtained from a Gallium Nitride (GaN) devices-based synchronous buck converter validate the feasibility of the proposed dither technique.