An Accurate Digital Inductor Current Sensor for Current-Ripple-Based DC-DC Converters.

This paper presents a digital current sensor for digitally-controlled current-ripple-based DC-DC buck converters to estimate the instantaneous inductor-current ripple accurately in both the Discontinuous (DCM) and Continuous (CCM) Current Modes. The current sensor employs a proposed dual- mode input multiplexing technique to select an appropriate representation of the pertinent voltage of the switching node (Vx) in any mode, thereby allowing the current to be estimated more accurately compared to that of the priorart design. The accurate inductor-current ripple information enables the controller to yield output-voltage transient response with small overshoot or undershoot (OS/US) and fast settling time. Benchmarking results using a digitally-controlled currentripple constant on-time DC-DC buck converter show that the converter employing the proposed sensor achieves >= 49% smaller OS/US and >= 45% faster settling time at the output voltage in both the DCM and the CCM collectively compared with that of the same converter but with the prior-art sensor.