Dear Dennis...
EN-Genius Network's Dennis Feucht answers your design
queries in his new Circuit Design Clinic!
October, 2009
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EN-Genius Network presents a new, interactive
analog design service to readers! Send us your design questions (with
relevant data; schematics in JPEG or GIF, please) for some free
engineering advice from EN-Genius Network's circuit
consultant, Dennis Feucht, on how you might solve a design problem or
improve circuit performance. Submissions may be edited for clarity or
brevity, and submitters and their email addresses will remain anonymous
(unless otherwise indicated). Please send your questions to Dennis here.
Switch-Mode Power Supplies: SPICE Simulations and Practical Designs
by Dennis L Feucht
by Christope P Basso, Published by McGraw-Hill
ISBN 13: 978-0-07-150859-9, hardback, 889 pp, $99.95, January 2008
This book is introduced by Ray Ridley, who is well-known in power electronics for his conceptual insights into current-mode converter control modeling. The author is French and works for ON Semiconductor in France. The subtitle emphasizes SPICE computer simulation of converters and it delivers with many SPICE examples. In having to pay heed to the necessary details of component models and of control dynamics so that they can be computer simulated, circuit modeling is covered in detail, with side-effects and second-order anomalies included. Although the emphasis is on the computation of circuit behavior, to do this, many details required in design must necessarily be considered that can be overlooked in theory-oriented books. This book has many useful practical details.
Basso stays mainly with the popular and well-established converter topologies, venturing only lightly into Cuk-derived circuits, ripple steering, or resonant converters, although at least one example of a resonant converter appears. There is also much emphasis on one of the more difficult aspects of converter design, the feedback dynamics. Basso does a good job of covering it rather extensively, including the necessary modeling of popular commercial control ICs such as the UC384X. Other popular components, such as the TL431 reference and differential amplifier and the SHF615 optoisolator are also reduced to models that can be used in formulating s-domain transfer functions.
The book also is not weak on presenting basic converter theory. The important design equations are worked out for individual circuits such as the RCD clamp and for converter-level behavior. This includes the incremental or small-signal switch models needed for feedback analysis. After about 900 pages of well-packed content, the reader is presented a CD with some SPICE programs that illustrate what is in the book.
As for weaknesses, credit first has to be given to anyone whose first language is not English to venture into technical writing in a foreign language, especially English. There is far less Franglish in this book than the Chinglish that I have found in other books on converters. Though this is secondary in importance, “Thanks to {equation number}” is annoying; we thank people and cite equations. Also, those European rectangular resistor symbols, which I use to represent impedances in general, are somewhat annoying, though some circuit diagrams use the American zigzag symbols. More substantially, although there are appendices in the book treating magnetics and the design of transductors for particular converter examples (of which there are many), this clearly is not the author’s area of emphasis, and nothing much appears about magnetics optimization, such as which core material is best for a given application. The book also does not push the frontiers much toward the ideal converter having constant input and output currents, nor does it seem to offer much insight into design optimization. However, in only 900 pages, one cannot cover everything about power converters in detail. This book emphasizes SPICE simulation, and in that direction it achieves a commendable goal.
Though I have never simulated a power circuit in SPICE (I use MathCAD for s-domain analysis, which is also used by Basso in the book), I consider this book to be one to have for anyone serious about converter engineering. It goes well beyond simulation as such and is full of useful material.
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