Cascade controller for DC/DC buck convertor

K.M. Tsang and W.L. Chan

Abstract: In order to deal with the increasing demand for good load and supply-voltage regulation
of DC/DC convertors, a new cascade controller is proposed. The control of DC/DC buck
convertor is rst decomposed into a primary voltage-control loop and a secondary current-control
loop. The cascade controller is then implemented based on the buck-converter settings with the
dynamics of the secondary loop much faster than these of the primary loop. A robustness analysis
of the cascade controller against load changes and supply changes is presented. Experimental
results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme over a
conventional single-loop PI controller. The proposed controller can be implemented as a low-cost
addon to a conventional single-loop controller. Detail design equations are presented.

1 Introduction which the PID family of controllers uses only output

The rapid increase in the computer and telecommunication
markets has led to the introduction of many powerful and
sophisticated devices. However, it also placed a high
demand on switching-mode power supplies [1]. Power
convertors are now subjected to larger load and supply-
voltage variations. The dynamic response of a conventional
power-supply system is generally too slow to follow the
sudden load changes introduced by modern microprocessor
systems. Fast load changes presented by high-speed
microprocessors have drastically increased the importance
of the dynamic response of power supplies. Moreover,
distributed power systems have come into widespread use in
the communications and related industries over the last
decade. In these systems, the electrical power-distribution
network has been changed from one central power supply
with cables or buses to a number of smaller power-
processing units that are placed throughout the host system.
The usual intent is to bring the power processing closer to
the subsystems where the power is used. The most common
way is to distribute a 48 V bus across a back plane [2].
Several choices exist for selecting the intermediate bus
voltage from the output of the 48 V converter, depending on
power level and the quantity of rails. The most common on-
board distribution schemes today are 3.3, 5 and 12 V.
Buck convertors and synchronous-buck convertor are
step-down switching-mode power convertors. They are
popular because of their high efciency and compact size.
They are used in place of a linear voltage regulator at a
relatively high output power. Buck convertors are the most
widely used type of power convertor in battery-powered
applications. There is an increasing need for good
controllers to obtain tight output-voltage regulation under
different supply and load conditions. Conventional DC/DC
convertors use simple single-loop voltage-mode control, in
r IEE, 2005
IEE Proceedings online no. 20045198
doi:10.1049/ip-epa:20045198
Paper rst received 26th October 2004 and in revised form 6th January 2005.
Originally published online: 20th April 2005
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
E-mail: steve.tsang@polyu.edu.hk
voltage as the feedback. However, their performances are
not satisfactory under parameter variation, nonlinearity,
large supply and load disturbances [3]. To improve the
situation, state-feedback control [4] was introduced but
accurate mathematical models are required. The introduc-
tion of robust control [5], sliding-mode control [3] and
fuzzy-logic controllers [3] solved the problem of parameter
variation and these are able to perform well under imprecise
inputs or high nonlinearity. However, the dynamic response
will be sacriced, especially in the presence of sudden
increases in supply voltage. Moreover, the knowledge of
parameter-variation range is required in order to ensure
stability. A simple way to improve transient response is to
introduce saturation logic on the duty ratio, reduce the
inductor value and increase the capacitance of the output
capacitor [6]. However, the capacitor could be too big and
the capacitance value may be impractical. This approach
also causes large inductor-current ripple and results in high
switching losses. To improve the transient response, an
multiphase interleaved parallel convertor [7] was introduced
but the cost and the complexity of control are the major
pitfalls of such topology.
Recently, dual-loop control techniques have been intro-
duced to solve the problem of single-loop control. The
traditional current-mode control scheme in which there are
two feedback loops, the inner-inductor-current loop and the
output-voltage loop has the advantage of very good supply-
voltage regulation. However, it also has the problem of
subharmonic instability [8] when the duty ratio is over 50%.
Recently, dual-loop one-cycle control [9] was proposed to
avoid the current-sensing requirement. Instead of using
inductor current, the integration value of the diode voltage
was used. The load transient response can be better if V 2
control [10] is used. The voltage across the equivalent series
resistance (ESR) of the output capacitor was used. The
difference between V 2 control and current-mode control is
that V 2 method uses load ripple voltage while current-mode
control uses inductor current as feedback variable. How-
ever, the ESR is the critical factor that affects the convertor
performance.
In this paper, cascade control of a DC/DC buck
convertor is proposed. The highly underdamped DC/DC
buck convertor can be resolved to two rst-order systems
describing the voltage and current dynamics. Simple

IEE Proc.-Electr. Power Appl., Vol. 152, No. 4, July 2005 827
proportional-plus-integral controllers can easily be designed and the current-loop dynamics governed by
for the two rst-order systems. The overall design will be
Li_L t vo t d tvi t
composed of two control loops with the voltage loop
outside the inner-current loop. As long as the dynamics of
the inner-current loop are much faster than those of the 3.1 Voltage-control loop
outer voltage loop, cascade control can be implemented. In If the inductor current iL(t) is taken as the control input to
the case of cascade control, the output of the primary the convertor, the transfer function between the output
controller is used to manipulate the setpoint of the regulated voltage and the inductor current becomes
secondary controller as if it were the nal control element. Vo s R
Better disturbance rejection can be obtained using cascade G v s 2
IL s RCs 1
control because the overall system can be tuned to work at a
faster speed and much larger gain can be used because the where Vo s is the Laplace transform of vo t, IL(s) is the
system under control has been simplied to two rst-order Laplace transform of iL(t) and s is the Laplace variable.
systems. Experimental examples are included to demon- Consider a proportional-plus-integral (PI) controller of the
strate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The form
proposed controller can be implemented as a low-cost K1 R1 Cs 1
addon to a conventional single-loop controller. GPI1 s 3
R1 s
2 Model of DC/DC buck convertor where K1 and R1 are coefcients. The closed-loop transfer
function becomes
A schematic diagram for the DC/DC buck convertor is Vo s GPl1 sGv s
shown in Fig. 1 and the state-space averaging model H B s
Vr s 1 GPIl sGv s
describing the voltage and current dynamics is given by 4
9
Li_L t vo t dtvi t > K1 R1 RCs K1 R
=
1 R1 RCs2 R1 K1 R1 RC s K1 R
vo t >
C v_ o t iL t
; where Vr s is the Laplace transform of the reference
R
voltage vr t. The system characteristic equation is given by
where L is the inductance, C is the capacitance, R is the
loading resistance, iL(t) is the inductor current, vo(t) is the Ds R1 RCs2 R1 K1 R1 RC s Kl R 5
output voltage, vi(t) is the supply voltage and d(t) is the duty with undamped natural frequency
ratio, respectively. The model is reasonably accurate for r r
K1 R K
large-signal analysis under the continuous-conduction on 6
mode. Although under the discontinuous-conduction mode R1 RC R1 C
the modelling error will be increased, the analysis result is and the damping ratio z governed by
still useful and able to give the correct trend. Note that DC/ R1 K1 R1 RC 1
DC buck convertors are highly underdamped systems. To 2zon K1 7
avoid excessive oscillations in closed-loop control under R1 RC RC
load or supply-voltage changes, either proportional con- Clearly, the undamped natural frequency on is independent
trollers or proportional-plus-integral controllers with the of the loading resistor R. Carrying out the design based on
proportional gain set to rather low levels are used. the nominal load with R R1 and the closed-loop system to
Derivative actions are seldom used to avoid the differentia- be critically damped with z 1 gives
tion of the switching actions. When proportional controllers 1
are used, a fast speed of response can be obtained in 2on K1 8
sacricing the steady-state errors. When proportional-plus- R1 C
integral controllers are used, comparatively slower systems and
will result but steady-state errors can be removed. r
K1
on 9
R1 C
L iL
Solving (8) and (9) for K1 yields
1
K1 10
R1 C
Vi C R Vo
and the undamped natural frequency
1
on 11
Fig. 1 DC/DC Buck convertor R1 C

3.1.1 Worst-case analysis: For the voltage-control

loop, the uncertainty has arisen from different loading
3 Cascade-controller design
conditions. To assess the robustness of the control design
From (1), the control of a buck convertor can be with (3) and (10), two extreme cases are tested. With the
decomposed to an outer-voltage-control loop and an loading resistor approaches zero, from (7)
inner-current-control-loop with the voltage dynamics gov- 2zon 1 12
erned by implies that the system is well overdamped with z N. If
vo t the loading resistor approaches innity,
C v_ o t iL t
2zon K1 ) z 0:5 13
R
828 IEE Proc.-Electr. Power Appl., Vol. 152, No. 4, July 2005
The two tests indicate that the system is well under control Again, if the current loop is set to be critically damped with
under different loading conditions because, if the load the damping ratio equal to 1,
current is above the nominal value, the system will be K2 TVi 2
overdamped resulting in a slower response system. Even if 2N on )T 18
L N on
the load current is well below the nominal value, the
damping ratio will not fall below 0.5. Hence for the current-loop PI controller of (14) with the
settings of (17) and (18), the undamped natural frequency of
3.2 Current-loop control the current loop will be N times that of the voltage loop and
From the voltage-control loop, if the output command of the current loop is critically damped under nominal supply
the PI controller is taken as the reference inductor current, a voltage Vi .
current-control loop can be designed based on the current
dynamics. If the supply voltage is xed at Vi, the current 3.2.1 Robustness analysis: For the current-con-
dynamics become trol loop, the uncertainly has arisen from the supply
voltage. If the supply voltage is doubled, p from (16) the
Li_L t vo t Vi dt undamped natural frequency becomes 2N p on and the
and a block-diagram representation of the current-loop damping ratio of the current loop becomes 2. When the
control is shown in Fig. 2 where ir(t) is the reference supply voltage is halved, p from (16) the undamped natural
inductor current generated by the primary-loop PI con- frequency becomesp N o n = 2 and the damping ratio of the
troller. Since the dynamics of the current loop are very current loop is 2=2. Even if there is a 50% reduction or
much faster than these of the primary voltage loop, the 100% increase in the supply voltage, the current loop is still
output regulated voltage vo(t) can be regarded as a constant well under control.
disturbance. To eliminate the constant load disturbance, a
PI controller is included within the control loop. If the PI 4 Experimental setup and results
controller takes the form
An experimental DC/DC Buck converter has been built
K2 Ts 1 with L 1 mH, C 120 mF, nominal supply voltage
GPI2 s 14
s Vi 50 V. The nominal load current was 1 A. The output
regulated voltage was set to 10 V and the nominal loading
resistor R1 was 10 O. From (10),
vo(t) 1
K1 833:3
PI controller R1 C
ir (t) d(t) iL(t)
+ GPI2(s) Vi +
1 and the voltage-loop PI controller of (3) becomes
Ls
83:33
GPI1 s 0:1
s
For the current control-loop, the current-loop dynamics
Fig. 2 Current-control loop were set to 20 times faster than the voltage dynamics with
N 20. From (17) and (18),
N 2 o2n L 2
K2 5555 T 1:2  10
4
where K2 and T are coefcients, the output inductor current Vi N on
can be determined by superposition theorem and becomes and the current-loop PI controller of (14) becomes
s
IL s
2 Vo s 5555
Ls K2 TVi s K2 Vi GPI2 s 0:6666
s
K2 Ts 1Vi Figure 3 shows the block diagram of the cascade controller,
Ir s 15 and the corresponding hardware implementation of the
Ls2 K2 TVi s K2 Vi cascade control of DC/DC Buck convertor is shown in
where IL(s) and Ir(s) are the Laplace transform of the Fig. 4. The switching frequency of the convertor was set to
inductor current and the reference current, respectively. Eq. 45 kHz. The controller was implemented as an add-on to a
(15) indicates that, if Vo s is well regulated at a xed level, single-loop controller using a SG3525 PWM controller. The
the PI controller can eliminate the disturbance contributed add-on PI controller was implemented using a low-cost dual
by the output voltage. One important requirement for operational amplier TL072. The closed-loop character-
cascade control is that the secondary-loop process dynamics istics of the single-loop PI controller as a DC/DC power
must be much faster than the primary-loop process convertor have been presented in [11, 12].
dynamics. As a rule of thumb, secondary-loop process
dynamics must be at least four times as fast as primary-loop 4.1 Experimental results
process dynamics. If the undamped natural frequency of the To compare the performance of the proposed cascade
current loop is set to N times faster than the voltage loop controller with that of a conventional single-loop PI
such that controller, arrangements with changing loads and changing
r supply voltage were tested. The transfer function for the
K2 Vi single-loop PI controller was given by
oI N on N 44 16
L 1
GPI s 0:0001
The required K2 is thus given by s
which is implemented with the SG3525 PWM controller.
N 2 o2n L The single-loop PI controller was obtained in such a way
K2 17
Vi that the closed-loop step response under nominal working

IEE Proc.-Electr. Power Appl., Vol. 152, No. 4, July 2005 829
 reference reference
voltage duty
current ratio

r (t) ir (t) DC/DC
0.1s + 83.33 0.6666s + 5555 d(t)
+ + buck
s s converter

inductor current iL(t)

output voltage
o(t)

Fig. 3 Cascade control of DC/DC Buck convertor

IRF 840
1 mH

+
50 V BY399 120 F R (10 )

0.12 F 0.5 k 3.75 k

0.012 F
100 k
10 v 100 k 10 k
10 k

+ 20 k 1 3
100 k TLO72a + 37.5 k IN OUT
TLO72b +
100 k

SG3525 and MOSFET driver

Fig. 4 Circuit diagram of cascade controller for DC/DC Buck convertor

conditions did not have any overshoots and the closed-loop
system was well damped even under light load conditions.
The closed-loop characteristic using a single-loop PI
controller possessed similar damping characteristic to those
of the closed-loop characteristic using a cascade controller.
This ended up with a slower response system because the
controller gain could not be too large.
4.1.1 Load-regulation performance: The refer-
ence output voltage was set to 10 V and the load demand
was switched between 1 A and 0.01 A by changing the
loading resistor with a MOSFET which was driven by a
square-wave signal generator. Fig. 5 shows the performance
of the conventional single-loop PI controller with channel 1
indicating the AC-coupled DC output-regulated voltage
and channel 2 indicating the current demand of the load.
The disturbance on the output-regulated voltage went as
high as 5 V and it took more than 100 ms to settle down.
Fig. 6 shows the performance of the cascade controller with
the same load demand. The disturbance on the output-
regulated voltage decreased to 1V and it took around 10 ms
to settle down. Clearly, the performance of the cascade
controller was far superior to conventional single loop PI
controller with better disturbance rejection and faster speed
of response.
10ms CH1 +DC Run 220m V? 0.00

T
1
100ms CH1 +DC Stp 1.50 V? 0.00

T
1

1: 500mV 2: 50 mV f = 57.237 Hz PWR

Fig. 6 Performance of cascade controller with changing load

2

1:5.0 V 2: 50 mV f = 1.2915 Hz PWR

4.1.2 Switching supply
Fig. 5 Performance of single-loop PI controller with changing The reference output voltage was set to 10 V with constant-
loads current demand of 1 A. However the supply voltage was
830 IEE Proc.-Electr. Power Appl., Vol. 152, No. 4, July 2005
switched between 27 V and 50 V by changing the output
voltage of a LM338 linear voltage regulator with a square-
wave signal generator. Fig. 7 shows the performance of the
conventional single-loop PI controller with channel 1
indicating the AC-coupled DC output-regulated voltage
and channel 2 indicating the supply voltage. The dis-
turbance on the output-regulated voltage went as high as
10 V when the supply voltage was changed from 27 V to
50 V and it took around 50 ms for the output to settle down.
Fig. 8 shows the performance of the cascade controller with
the same changing supply. The disturbance on the output-
regulated voltage went down to 1 V when the supply voltage
was changed from 27 V to 50 V and it took around 10 ms to
settle down. Again, the cascade controller outperformed the
conventional single-loop PI controller with better distur-
bance rejection and a faster speed of response.
5 Conclusions
A new cascade controller has been implemented successfully
for the control of a DC/DC Buck convertor. The controller
settings can easily be obtained from the Buck-convertor
settings. The proposed cascade controller outperforms a
conventional single-loop PI controller with better distur-
bance rejection and a faster speed of response. The
controller has been shown to be robust against load
changes and supply changes. Robustness analyses of the
cascade controller against load changes and supply changes
have been presented. The proposed controller can be
implemented as a low-cost add-on to a conventional single-
loop controller. Detail-design equations were presented for
practising engineers.
6 Acknowledgment

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of Hong

100ms CH1 +DC Stp 1.50 V? 0.00 Kong Polytechnic University.

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1:1.0 V 2 : 20 V f = 508.93 Hz PWR

Fig. 8 Performance of cascade controller with changing supply

IEE Proc.-Electr. Power Appl., Vol. 152, No. 4, July 2005 831