
Applications Information (Continued)
During normal operation, if V
CC voltage drops below 3.6V,
the internal circuitry will go into power-on-reset again. The
hysteresis helps decrease the noise sensitivity on the V
CC
pin.
After soft start ends and during normal operation, if the con-
verter output voltage exceeds 118% of DAC output voltage,
the LM2637 will lock into over-voltage protection mode. The
high-side drive will be low, and the low-side drive will be high.
There are two ways to clear the mode. One is to cycle V
CC
voltage once. The other is to toggle the EN level. After the
over-voltage protection mode is cleared, the LM2637 will en-
ter the soft start session and start over.
Linear Section — The linear section does not go through a
soft start. Whenever the soft start of the switching section
begins, the linear section immediately applies the required
gate voltages or base currents for external power transistors.
There is an under-voltage latch-off for the linear section. If
after soft start ends, SNS2 or SNS3 is below 0.63V, the cor-
responding gate drive will be disabled and PWGD pin will be
pulled low.
Normal Operation
Switching Section — In the normal operation mode, the
LM2637 regulates the converter output voltage by adjusting
the duty ratio. The output voltage is determined by the 5-bit
VID code set by the user or MPU.
The PWM frequency is set by an external resistor between
FREQ pin and ground. The resistance needed for a desired
PWM frequency can be determined by the following equa-
tion:
(1)
For example, if the desired PWM frequency is 300 kHz, the
resistance should be around 84 k
.
The minimum allowable PWM frequency is 5 kHz.
Linear Section — Under steady state operation, the linear
section supplies the appropriate gate voltage or base current
to correctly bias the external pass transistor so that the volt-
age drop across the transistor is the right value.
Resetting the LM2637
When the LM2637 detects an abnormal condition such as
switching regulator over voltage, it will latch itself off partially
or completely. To reset the LM2637, either EN or V
CC voltage
has to be toggled. Another more subtle way to recover is to
float all the VID pins and reapply the correct code.
Gate Drives
Switching Section — The switching controller has two gate
drives that are suitable for driving external power N-FETs in
a synchronous buck topology. The voltage for the two FET
drivers is supplied by the V
DD pin. This VDD voltage should
be at least one V
GS(th) higher than converter input voltage to
be able to fully enhance the high-side FET. In a typical PC
motherboard application, it is recommended that 12V be ap-
plied to V
DD, and 5V be used as the input voltage for the
switcher. A charge pump is not recommended since the lin-
ear sections need a stable V
DD voltage to minimize high fre-
quency noise.
ForaV
DD of 12V, the peak gate charging current is typically
2A, and the peak gate discharging current is typically 6A,
well suited for high speed switching.
The LM2637 gate drives are of BiCMOS design. Unlike
some bipolar control ICs, the gate drive has rail-to-rail swing
that ensures no spurious turn-on due to capacitive coupling.
Another feature of the FET gate drives is the adaptive
non-overlapping mechanism. A gate drive is not turned on
until the other is fully off. The dead time in between is typi-
cally 20 ns. This avoids the potential shoot-through problem
and helps improve efficiency.
Linear Section — The gate drives of the linear section can
put out a maximum continuous current of about 40 mA. The
typical low gate voltage is 1.2V.
Load Transient Response
Switching Section — In a typical modern MPU application
such as the M II, Pentium II and K6-2 core power supply,
load transient response is a critical issue. The LM2637 uti-
lizes the conventional voltage feedback technology as the
primary feedback control method. When the load transient
happens, the error in the output voltage level is fed to the er-
ror amplifier. The output of the error amplifier is then com-
pared with an internally generated PWM ramp signal and the
result of the comparison is a series of pulses with certain
duty ratios. These pulses are then used to control the on and
off of the FET gate drives. In this way, the error in the output
voltage gets corrected by the change in the duty ratio of the
FET switches. During a large load transient, depending on
the compensation design, the change in duty ratio usually
begins within one switching cycle. Refer to the
Design Con-
siderations section for more details.
Besides the voltage feedback control loop, the LM2637 also
has a pair of fast comparators (the MIN and MAX compara-
tors) to help maintain the output voltage during a large and
fast load transient. The trip points of the comparators are set
to ±5% of the DAC output voltage. When the load transient
is so large that the output voltage goes outside the ±5% win-
dow, the MIN or MAX comparator will bypass the primary
voltage control loop and immediately set the duty ratio to ei-
ther 100% or 0%. This provides the fastest possible way to
react to such a large load transient in a conventional buck
converter.
Linear Section — The linear section has a high control band-
width. Depending on external components selected, the typi-
cal bandwidth can be as high as 1.2 MHz. The user may
choose to lower this bandwidth and have a better noise im-
munity by adding a small capacitor (1 nF to 10 nF) between
the gate output and ground.
Power Good Signal
The power good signal is to indicate whether all three output
voltages are within their corresponding range. The range for
the switching regulator is set to a typical ±10% window of the
DAC output voltage. The range for the linear regulator is
0.63V to infinity. During soft start, the power good signal is
kept low. At the completion of soft start, all three output volt-
ages are checked and the PWGD pin will be asserted if they
are all within specified range. During normal operation,
whenever a voltage goes out of the specified range for more
than about 3 s, PWGD pin will be pulled low.
Over-Voltage Protection
Switching Section — When the output voltage exceeds
118% of the DAC output voltage any time beyond the soft
start, the switching section will enter over-voltage protection
mode and shuts itself down. The upper gate drive will be
held low while the lower gate drive will be held high. PWGD
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