DSP Implementation for Measuring the Loop Gain Frequency Response of Digitally Controlled Power Converters

This paper presents a method for measuring the loop gain frequency response of digitally controlled power converters, without the need of any expensive measurement equipment such as frequency response analyzers (FRA). The method is based on the traditional perturbation and measurement scheme. The perturbation is internally synthesized by the DSP and applied as pulse-width modulation to the converter. The loop input and output data are sent to a PC via universal serial bus, which performs online the DFT of sent data. The perturbation amplitude is varied with frequency to improve signal-to-noise ratio of measurements. The number of cycles used to perform discrete Fourier transform calculations is also varied to reduce the error induced by some rounding factors at high frequencies. The proposed method offers accuracy, ease of implementation, and low computational cost.