Generation of a High Resolution Digital Pulse-Width Modulator through Digital Control in General Purpose Field Programmable Gate Array

Pulse width modulators are the basic building block in digital control architectures of any power converters. The design of power converters requires a high resolution high frequency pulse width modulators (HRPWMs) in order to reduce the size and cost, improved dynamic behaviour and power density. Hence, this paper proposes a review of digital pulse-width modulation (DPWM) architecture that takes advantage of the field programmable gate array (FPGA) advanced characteristics, especially the Internal Logic Blocks (Internal Carry Chain) present in the Virtex 4 FPGA and the Digital Clock Manager (DCM) present in the low cost Spartan - 3E FPGA. Given the interest of obtaining high-resolution DPWMs, a lot of different architectures have been proposed in the last years, and even a classification of them has appeared. These architectures are designed and compared to analyze the performance.