2014 IEEE 28-th Convention of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in Israel

Implementation of a High Voltage Power Supply

With The Matlab/Simulink Embedded Coder
Liran Katzir, Yakir Loewenstern, Bishara Bishara and Doron Shmilovitz
School of Electrical Engineering
Tel-Aviv University
Israel

Abstract—An implementation of a high voltage power supply compared to an unregulated high voltage power supply.
with a voltage multiplier using a DSP-based controller is pro-
posed. The DSP controller is used to close the feedback loop II. H ALF WAVE C OCKROFT-WALTON VOLTAGE
from the output voltage to the PWM signals of the power stage. M ULTIPLIER
By using the MATLAB/Simulink embedded coder design time is
greatly reduced and errors are far less likely to manifest. The In the Half Wave Cockroft Walton (HWCW) voltage multi-
design, consisting of a DSP controller, does not require addi- plier, shown in Fig. 1, the output DC voltage is distorted, and
tional components and is simple compared to more conventional shows a voltage drop of ∆V0 and a ripple of 2δV
analog control techniques. Experimental results using the Texas
Instruments (TI) DSP TMS320F28335 Microcontroller show a I 1 2 3 n
δV = ( + + + ··· + ) (1)
rapid convergence and good real-time behavior. For example, 2fs C1 C2 C3 Cn
the output of a 12-link multiplier with a rise time lower than
5mS and a low ripple of under 0.1% is actively corrected by the where I is the output current, Ci is the capacitance of the
digital feedback loop. i-th stage and fs is the switching frequency of the AC power
Index Terms—High Voltage, HVDC, Half Wave Cockcroft- supply. Assuming equal capacitors in all stages (C1 = C2 =
Walton. C3 = · · · = Cn = C), the ripple is given by Eq. (2) and the
voltage drop by Eq. (3).
I. I NTRODUCTION
I n(n + 1)
High voltage power supplies are widely used in many δV = (2)
Cfs 4
industry applications, such as scanning electron microscopy,  3
n2

medical X-ray imaging and particle filtering systems, to name I 2n n
∆V0 = + − (3)
just a few [1]-[5]. The use of a very high turn ratio transformer fs C 3 2 6
to achieve the high voltage is limited by its large leakage Thus, the output voltage of a HWCW voltage multiplier
inductance and parasitic capacitance [6]. Therefore, voltage circuit can be calculated as a function of the amplitude of the
multiplier circuits are commonly used to attain high voltages. ac input voltage, Vamp :
The Half-Wave Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier (HWCW)
is the most commonly used voltage multiplier because it Vout = 2nVamp − ∆V0 =
provides the advantages of high voltage boosting (applicable I 2n3 n2 n (4)
= 2nVamp − ( + − )
to the 10’s kV range), is compact, causes low voltage stress fs C 3 2 6
on the diodes and capacitors, and is cost efficient [7]. Eq. (4) reveals that additional stages to the HWCW circuit
Power supplies for medical devices such as an X-ray gen- that should increase the output voltage also increase the
erator need to supply high voltage and high power for very voltage drop, till the point where additional stages will no
short time intervals. Therefore, in order to meet the stringent longer increase the output voltage but reduce it. Finding the
requirements of X-ray applications the dynamic response of maximum voltage output of a HWCW circuit is attained as in
the power supply must be very fast. The output voltage must Eq. (5)
reach its steady state within a very short time interval, usually
around 10 msec, to avoid noise or defects in X-ray the ∂Vout I 1
= 2Vamp − (2n2 + n − ) = 0 (5)
image for various load conditions[3][4]. For this paper, we ∂n fs C 6
implemented a DSP-based-controller approach for reducing From Eq. (5), the maximum number of stages to be used
design time of the HWCW voltage multipliers and improving for a given system can be approximated (if n > 4) as
the output ripple. The TI TMS320F28335 Microcontroller with r
the MATLAB/Simulink embedded coder is used for real-time Vout fs C 1
nmax = + (6)
digital feedback and system control. I 12
Initial experimental results show a a fast settling time To reduce the output ripple, it is necessary to increase either
of under 5mS and a reduction of over 80% of the ripple the switching frequency or the capacitance of the multiplier.
 Fig. 1. Example of a HWCW voltage-multiplier

Increasing the switching frequency is often problematic as it

increases the switching losses, while increasing the capaci-
tance of the multiplier is expensive and makes the circuit Fig. 2. PWM signals for a full-bridge %100 phase-shift during power-up
bulkier. Another way to reduce the output ripple is to use a fast
feedback loop, usually at at-least ten times the base switching
frequency, thus correcting the output ripple in real time. This
can be accomplished using a DSP-based controller to process
feedback samples at high frequency.

III. T HE TMS320F28335 DSP M ICROCONTROLLER

The TMS320F28335 is a Digital Signal Controller with
integrated Analog to Digital converters (ADC), Digital Sig-
nal Processing capabilities and High-Resolution Pulse Width
Modulators (HRPWM). The DSP operates with core frequency
of 150 MHz. The ADC samples the output signal at a
12.5Msps rate, calculates an average of 8 samples to get a
better SNR than that obtained by direct sampling and uses
the HRPWM to drive the full-bridge power stage of the
high voltage multiplier. Thus it is possible to use a high-
voltage power supply with a 100KHz switching frequency
and the feedback loop will still be at least ten times faster.
The controller samples the output voltage through a feedback
resistor and an isolation amplifier, compares it to the required
voltage output and generates the PWM signals for the full-
bridge power stage. The full-bridge power stage operates by a
phase-shift concept, where the V rms output of the full-bridge
is controlled by a phase-shift between two half-bridges.
Fig. 2 and 3 show the PWM signals generated by the
TMS320F28355 controller for the phase-shift operation. Fig.
2 displays the signals for a 100% shift which is common
during power-up and full-load operation, while 3 shows the
PWM signals during normal operation, in this case with a
5M Ω load. It should be noted that during normal operation
the phase-shift is constantly moving around the steady-state
level to compensate for the ripple.
IV. M ATHLAB /S IMULINK E MBEDDED C ODER
The TMS320F28355 controller is generally programed us-
ing dedicated software from TI, the ”Code Composer Studio”
(CCS)[12]. However, it is quite difficult to design complex
systems such as closed-loop feedback or a multiple-PWM
control scheme directly in the code composer studio. The
required reduction of the output ripple using a full-bridge
Fig. 3. PWM signals for a full bridge %53.6 phase shift during stady-state
Operation
power HWCW voltage multiplier requires both a fast dynamic
response and the control of 4 individual , with both dead-time
and phase shift real-time control.
The Full-Bridge Phase-shifted PWM converter has found
many applications in design of high power-density power
supplies due to its zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) and simple
control characteristics[11]. This converter topology permits
all switching devices to operate under ZVS by using circuit
parasitics to achieve resonant switching. To guarantee ZVS
operation, a proper determination of the dead time between the
upper and lower switching devices is important. The phase-
shift between the switching components of the full-bridge can
be used to control the output voltage.
To simplify the design we implemented the control al-
gorithm in MATLAB and designed the ADC and PWM
in Simulink. The MATLAB/Simulink embedded coder is
able to generate ANSI/ISO C/C++ code that can be com-
piled and executed on microcontrollers, and specifically the
TMS320F28335, using Code Composer Studio software be-
hind the scenes. The embedded coder allows users to easily
configure code generated by the MATLAB and Simulink
algorithms and makes it easier to design and implement the
feedback loop and the PWM signals driving the power-stage.
Fig. 4 shows the top level of the MATLAB/Simulink used in
designing the suggested system, including the ADC sampling
and scaling, processing of the samples to obtain a higher
SNR, the controller implementation including the output over-
voltage and over-power protection, and finally, the control
algorithm for the dynamic PWM siganls.

Fig. 5. The system under test, n=12, RLoad=100 M,

and compared to the convectional HWCW. The resultds show

Fig. 4. The control and feedback loop for the Full-Bridge power stage
implemented in Mathlab/Simulink
that the voltage ripple was considerably lower than the regular
open looped HWCW multiplier, especially under a high output
current. For example, with a 5M Ω load, the ripple of a 12-
link multiplier fed by an AC input of 500V was 312V . By
using the DSP and closed-loop feedback the output ripple was
reduced to lower than 15V.

TABLE I VI. C ONCLUSIONS

D ETAILS OF THE EXPERIMENT
A high-voltage power supply, using a voltage multiplier con-
Full-Bridge power stage
trolled by a DSP-based controller was presented. The closed
feedback loop was implemented by sampling the output,
Frequency 100kHz
processing in the controller and correcting by manipulating
Duty 50-100% the PWM phase-shift signal. The design was done using using
Dead time 200ns the MATLAB/Simulink embedded coder, greatly reducing the
Power Transformer design time. The design is relatively simple and can be im-
Core 3F3 plemented using a low cost controller. Experimental results of
the high voltage power supply using the DSP TMS320F28335
Ratio 1:30
Microcontroller from TI show a a good convergence and real-
Voltage Multiplier
time behavior with a large reduction of output ripple.
Diode Vishay GP02-30
Cap 1nF , 3kV ACKNOWLEDGMENT
High Voltage Probe The authors would like to thank Texas Instruments for their
Tektronix P6015A generous donation of DSP controllers and educational kits for
the Energy Conversion Lab, School of Electrical Engineering,
DSP Controller
Tel-Aviv University.
Teaxes Instruments TMS320F28335
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