Inductive spikes

One of the labs in my textbook Applied Analog Electronics asks students to look at the inductive spikes created by switching a nFET on and off with a loudspeaker as a load:

A 5V pulse signal to Gn will turn the nFET on.

My students were very confused when they tried the experiment, because they got a different result:

What the students got at the nFET drain went a little above 5V, but did not have the enormous inductive spike they expected.

Of course, I lied to you a little about what their circuit was—they were working with half-H-bridge boards that they had soldered:

The half H-bridge boards have a pFET and capacitor on them, as well as an nFET.

The pFET was left unconnected, so the circuit was really the following:

The gate and pFET source were left floating in the student setups.

So what difference does the pFET make? Well, with the gate floating and staying near 0V, the pFET turns on when the pFET source voltage gets high enough, allowing the capacitor to charge.

The pFET source gets up to about 7.2–7.3V, and the time constants for the capacitor and loudspeaker are long enough that the capacitor looks like a power supply (not changing voltage much on this time scale), so that the body diode of the pFET snubs the inductive spike at about a diode drop above the pFET source voltage.

So how did I miss this problem when I did my testing before including the lab in the book? One possibility is that I left out the bypass capacitor—without it you get the expected spike. But I know I had included the capacitor on my half-H-bridge boards—I had to solder up a board without the bypass capacitor specially last night, in order to get the “expected” plot in the first plot of this post.  I think what happened is that when I had done my tests, I had always connected the pFET gate to the pFET source, to ensure that the pFET stayed off, but when I wrote the book, I forgot that in the instructions. Here are the plots of the board with the pFET gate and source tied together (both floating), both floating separately, and with the them both tied to 5V:

With the pFET gate and source tied together, the circuit behaves as expected, with large inductive spikes if the pFET source is floating, but snubbed to a diode drop above 5V if the source is tied to 5V.

The pFET source voltage gets quite high when the pFET gate and source are tied together to keep the FET off, but they are not tied to the power rail:

Because the pFET never turns on, the body diode and capacitor acts as a peak detector, and the capacitor charges until the leakage compensates for the charge deposited on each cycle, around 33.7V, snubbing the inductive spike at about 37V (more than a diode drop above, but the duration is short).

This summer and fall, when I’ll be working on the next edition of the book, I’ll be sure to improve the instructions for the FET lab!

SOT-23 FETs for half H-bridge

In Breakout board for SOT-23 FETs, I gave the schematic and layout pictures for a half H-bridge breakout board using SOT-23 surface-mount FETs.  The boards arrived today, 12 days after I ordered them. The boards cost $4.86 plus $23.79 shipping, but I had them panelize the design, and they sent me 13 copies instead of 10, so I ended up with 546 boards (instead of 420), making a cost of 5.24¢ each.

One of the panelized board. The panels are just separated with V cuts, so the corner rounding is not very good, but there is some, and I did not end up with sharp corners after cutting off a row of boards with tin snips.

With the transistors, capacitor, and headers, each half H-bridge will cost under 40¢ in 100s—much less than the approximately $1.37/half H-bridge that separate TO-220 FETs cost.

Today I tried soldering on a  PMV20XNER nFET (14.9¢ in 100s) and SSM3J332R pFET (12.4¢ in 100s), a 5-long right-angle header, and a 10µF ceramic capacitor. I wanted to do this with pretty much the same tools the students would have, so I did not use a board holder nor cross-lock tweezers (both of which would have made the job slightly easier).  My technique was simple:

• Put the board face up on the bench.
• Place one FET using sharp-pointed tweezers.
• Tape the FET and the drain side down with a tiny piece of blue painters’ tape.
• Solder the source and gate.
• Remove the tape.
• Solder the drain.
• Repeat for the other FET.
• Put the headers through the holes (from the component side).
• Flip the board over and solder the header.
• Put the header pins into a breadboard at the edge of the board.
• Insert the capacitor from the component side.
• Prop the breadboard up so the solder side of the board is exposed.
• Solder the capacitor in place and trim its leads.

Soldering the first board went well.  The second one was a little harder (I had a bit of hand tremor), but still only took a few minutes.  Having made the lands huge (big enough for wave soldering) made alignment fairly simple—I did not have to be exact.

I tried one FET without the trick of taping the FET in place—that did not work at all, as the FET moved completely off the pad when I tried to solder.  I had to remove solder from the board with a solder sucker and redo the FET using tape.

Here are the front and back of the boards before and after populating, along with the pointed tweezers I used for placing the FETs.

Here is a close-up of one of the two boards I soldered (the one with the worst alignment—see the pFET at the top left).

I spent the rest of the afternoon checking that the boards were OK.  I used essentially the same setup as I used for Ron vs Vgs for pFETs and nFETS, with a 24Ω load and a 10V ramp that gradually turned the transistor off.  Because the test was the same, I plotted the results together with the old results:

The PMV20XNER transistor has a much lower threshold than the other nFETS I’ve looked at, but a comparable Ron to the other power nFETs.

The SSM3J332R pFET also has a low threshold voltage and the on resistance is in the same range as others we have used in the past.

It looks to me like the half-H-bridge will be a perfectly reasonable way for the students to get FETs for the class-D amplifier.  The current will be somewhat limited by the power dissipation of the pFET, but with an 8Ω speaker and 0.1Ω pFET, the power to the loudspeaker should be 80 times the power lost in the pFET, so the 10W limit on the loudspeaker should be reached well before the half H-bridge overheats.

Update: the EAGLE and Gerber files for this board are available at https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus/bme51/pc-boards/

Breakout board for SOT-23 FETs

After a discussion in the comments of Ron vs Vgs for pFETs and nFETS with Michael Johnson, I decided to design my own breakout boards for SOT-23 surface-mount FETs, with the possible use of them in the class-D amplifier lab in place of the through-hole TO-220 FETs we’ve been using.

I picked a couple of 30V FETs (one nFET, one pFET) whose data sheets indicated that they would have adequately low on-resistance with a gate voltage of only 2.5V (–2.5V for the pFET), so that the FETs could be controlled by a 3.3V logic signal with no problems.  I ended up picking PMV20XNER for nFET (14.9¢ in 100s) and SSM3J332R for pFET (12.4¢ in 100s).

Although the drain-to-source voltage is allowed to go to 30V, the gate-to-source voltage is more limited (±12V for both the nFET and the pFET).  That should be adequate for anything we do in the course, as our maximum power supply is ±5V, so we shouldn’t see any voltage differences bigger than 10V.  (I could have saved a few cents by using 20V FETs instead of 30V ones, maybe.)

Because the students use the FETs in an H-bridge, I decided to make my breakout board be a half H-bridge, with an nFET, a pFET, a bypass capacitor, and 5 right-angle header pins:

The schematic is quite simple. (The diodes are the body diodes of the FETs.)

The layout took me a while, because I wanted to make as much heat sinking as I could get on a small, cheap board.  The standard footprint for a ST-23 allows a thermal resistance of about 120 K/W. I did not push too hard though, because even with ideal layout, the SOT-23 packages still have terrible thermal conductivity (about 90 K/W)—essentially all the heat is being conducted through the thin drain pin.  (The SSM3J332R reports even worse numbers: 300 K/W with minimum footprint and 120 K/W with a square inch of copper.)

Solder side of the board. Visualization provided by https://gerber-viewer.easyeda.com/

Component side of the board. Visualization provided by https://gerber-viewer.easyeda.com/

My board is not nearly a square inch of copper—the entire board is only 15mm × 12.5mm, and only half of that is used for heatsinking the drains. I used the back of the board for radiating heat and provided thermal vias around the drain pads to connect the front and back. The footprint for the pads is one provided by the manufacturers for wave soldering—I thought it would be easier for had soldering than the much smaller pads used for reflow soldering.

The gate connections are on the outside, the source connections just inboard of them, and the shared drain in the middle.  The board is basically symmetric with respect to nFET and pFET, but I labeled the two sides so that there would be less variation in how students soldered them up.

The bypass capacitor is close to the FETs (much closer than the students ever got on a bread board), so we should see less noise injection back into the power rails than we’ve seen in the past. The resistance of the source and drain traces adds another 5mΩ of resistance to the H-bridge, which is not too bad—the beardboard probably adds more like 50mΩ.

If I understood their website correctly, I should be able to get 10 copies of the tiny board panelized in a 6×7 array (so 420 boards after I cut them apart) for only $4.90 from Smart-Prototyping.com.  Of course, I’m in a hurry, so I ended up paying an extra $23.79 for shipping with DHL, so the order costs $28.69, or <7¢ a board.  I also ordered 10 40-pin right-angle male headers (enough for 80 boards) for $4.11 from AliExpress, raising the price to 12¢ a board.

With the transistors, each half H-bridge will cost under 40¢ in 100s—much less than the approximately $1.37/half H-bridge that the separate TO-220 FETs cost.

The difference in cost is not important for the course ($2 a student), so my main consideration is whether the students will learn more by doing some surface mount soldering with a fixed cMOS half-H-bridge design or by continuing to wire up separate transistors on the bread board (making the usual student errors of getting the pinout wrong or general miswiring).  There is still plenty of room for error on the half H-bridge: swapping transistors, getting 2 nFET or 2 pFET instead of one of each, putting the whole board in backwards to short the power supply through the body diodes, …. .

The SOT-23s can’t dissipate quite as much heat as the TO-220s, but we’ll probably not have much heat to dissipate in reasonable designs.  With a 5V supply, 8Ω load, and 73mΩ on-resistance, the power dissipation in the pFET should be only about 28mW and the nFET even less—way less than the 500mW or so that I expect the boards to be able to handle.  Shoot-through current is mainly what the students will need to worry about, as that can get quite high with the low on-resistances of both the nFET and the pFET.

I’ve ordered the boards and parts to test out using the SOT-23 FETs and half-H-bridge boards.  If they work out well, I’ll probably rewrite the class-D lab to have students do a little surface-mount soldering (SOT-23s are about the simplest intro).

Power board soldered

This morning I managed to fix the problems that I had created for myself by my mistakes in soldering yesterday.  The power board is  now soldered and passes continuity tests (no adjacent pins shorted, all header pins connected where they are supposed to be.

Finished board, with annotation for the header pins. The whole board is 5cm×7cm.

The power board has several functions:

• The pair of H-bridges for the motors, powered directly from battery power input at the lower left, and controlled by PWM and DIR signals from the Teensy board (header pins at the top). The motor output wires are red and white header pins on the left side of the board, to match the red and white wires on the motors.  The two motors have red and white with opposite M1/M2 connections, so that matching DIR signal drives the motors in opposite directions.  Because the motors are mounted with shafts in opposite directions, this should result in the wheels turning the same way.
  There is a row of header pins on the right (input side) of each H-bridge, for hooking up oscilloscopes or other test equipment.  The EN– signal could be shorted to GND with a shorting plug, but the documentation claims that there is a pull-down resistor internally, so floating should be fine.
  The VM pins of the H-bridges have 220µF electrolytic capacitors as bypass, to reduce PWM noise from propagating back through the battery.  I was planning to add 10µF ceramic capacitors at the Vin pins, to reduce high-frequency noise, but I ran out of room.  If the high-frequency noise is a problem, I can try to squeeze in some bypass capacitors.
• NCP7805 5V 1A regulator (bottom center).  All the red and black pair to the right of the motor control are 5V and GND.  The GND pin of the regulator is the only place where the 5V and battery power systems are connected.
• The multiplexer connects one of the 8 white pins on the top right to the “out” pin, controlled by S2, S1, and S0. Up to 8 tape sensors can be connected with standard 3-wire servo cables.
• The 8 yellow pins are not connected to anything—they are there just to provide alignment for servo cables sending 5V power to other boards.  I may not need any of these connections, as the Teensy board can be powered from the 5V and Gnd connections adjacent to the motor signals and tape-sensor signals.
• There are also 4 pairs of yellow pins just above and to the right of the regulator.  These are intended for gathering the encoder wires from the two motors and transferring them to a single cable up to the Teensy board.  The power and ground connections there can also be used for the encoders.

This board will have a mass of connectors to it:

• battery (3-wire servo cable)
• motor connections (4 separate wires)
• motor encoder connections  (8 separate wires: +5V, GND, ENC1, and ENC2 for each motor)
• motor cable from Teensy (4 wires or 6 wires, depending whether 5V and GND included)
• tape-sensor cable to Teensy (4 wires or 6 wires, depending whether 5V and GND included)
• encoder cable to Teensy (4 wires)
• tape-wire sensors (3-wire servo cable to each sensor)

I still have to lay out and solder the carrier board for the Teensy, but that should be relatively easy, as I don’t have nearly so many wires and I only need to populate a few of the connectors.

Pololu MAX14870 H-bridge with current limitation

After about an hour of frustration, I finally got a 0.1Ω resistor soldered in place of a cut trace on the Pololu MAX 14870 H-bridge board.  This is supposed to limit the current to 1A, by doing PWM when the current is exceeded.

I then tried seeing how well it would do current limitation, using a 300µH inductor in series with various combinations of power resistors.

When the resistance is large enough that the current is limited to <1A by the power supply voltage, no PWM is done. At lower resistances, current control is done, but the resulting average current is not a constant 1A, but varies with the load.

The current control is a little more aggressive than I expected, with currents as low as 700mA rather than 1A.

With a 5Ω motor, I expect the stall current to be limited to 750–800mA, delivering about 3W to the motor.  A beefier motor with lower resistance would actually get less power (a 2Ω motor would be limited to about 800mA, delivering only 1.3W.  Without the current limits a 9.9V voltage source would deliver 19.6W to a 5Ω load and 49W to a 2Ω load. Of course, the internal resistance of a battery limits the voltage and current it can deliver to a 2Ω load.  The LiFe batteries we are using are only rated for 1.5A at 9.9V, so 14.8W is about as much as we can sustainably get from the battery, and I doubt that we get even that much.

The motors have no trouble starting with the <1A current, but stalling the motors with a heavy load starts the current limitation, and the average voltage stays well below the 6V rating for the motor.  So I think that using the current limitation with the sense resistors on the H-bridges gives enough protection for me to be able to use the 6V motors with the 9.9V battery