Daniel,
thanks for all your input and links! It has kept me busy and learning
for two days.
Your project is a great task, congratulations.
I just hope I can ever bring it to a successful end!
The main cause of transistors' failing is drain (collector) over-voltage
which often translates by over-current or avalanche.
The more I read up, the more it looks like I have to take all measures I
can to strictly avoid drain overvoltage. I had hoped that I could trust
the "extra rugged" LDMOSFETs to safely clamp overvoltage to some extent,
possibly enough to keep the amplifier running with high SWR as long as
the dissipation doesn't become excessive, but all you wrote and what I
could see in those articles discourages me from that idea. For example,
on of the articles talks about overvoltage failures happening either on
the body of the chip or at its periphery. Obviously any breakdown at the
periphery will happen only over a small area, and thus concentrate a lot
of power dissipation there, causing failure even at low dissipated power
levels. So it looks like I need to at least monitor drain peak voltage
to activate the protection, and perhaps even clamp it externally.
At this point I hope that at least I can trust the LDMOSFET's ruggedness
to handle brief overvoltages until the protection kicks in, but it's
not encouraging to read Microsemi's paper saying that always some
devices will fail during high SWR testing...
It is very difficult to limit over-voltage even if you limit the input
power, you have to take care of load impedance (swr), overshoot of ALC,
spurious signals, di/dt.
That's my problem. Any load impedance can happen on the antenna port,
the low pass filters transform these impedances, the non-zero line
length of the impedance transformation circuit transforms it further,
and to this we must add that the amp will have to work over 4 octaves
into at least half a dozen filters, which makes drain waveform control
an impossible task.
Externally clamping drain voltage is difficult due to the high current
and low impedance involved. "Active clamping" through negative feedback
that drives the transistor on when the voltage goes up can clamp the
voltage pretty well, but is somewhat hard to implement without risking
gate overvoltage. And of course it puts more dissipation into the
transistor, and may increase risk of latch-up. I don't fully understand
the last point at this time, I mean, how exactly latch-up happens, and
under what exact conditions.
> The second: Temperature, in amateur use, must
not be a problem in a well designed amplifier.
Specially in my amplifier, which is supposed to have a high efficiency,
thermal design is easier than in a linear class AB amplifier. But that
said, I must also say that many high power LDMOSFET ham amplifiers have
extremely marginal thermal designs, often running the LDMOSFET dies at
or even above the absolutely maximum rated temperature, resulting in
high risk of failure. I have also noticed that many ham experimenters,
and probably also some designers in the industry, don't fully understand
thermal design. They mount the device on a copper heat spreader, mount
that on a big heatsink with fans, and then they think they can safely
dissipate a kilowatt or more of heat. And unfortunately this isn't the
case! This leads to many hams killing LDMOSFETs simply by overheating them.
The problems with SWR are: that with a sudden SWR (open or short antenna
feeder), before the security device begins to respond,the transistor
sees infinite SWR.
And when we asked different manufacturers "how much time your device can
sustain an infinite vswr" their response where elusive.
This is largely what motivates my questions here: How much energy can a
given LDMOSFET safely clamp, how much power or current can it clamp for
how much time, and how much power or current can it clamp continuously
with no time limit in CW (not pulsed) operation.
If the answer is "zero", then no protection circuit alone is good
enough. The amplifier needs to be designed to actively suppress all
drain voltage peaks, for example through carefully designed, non-linear
drain-gate feedback. If instead the answer is that the transistor can
clamp a well defined amount of energy, with certain current and time
limits, then one can do without that non-linear feedback, and use a
fast-enough protection circuit that shuts down the amp. And what's
important to me too: If the transistor can continuously clamp a certain
amount of current, then I can allow operation into some high SWR
conditions. If it cannot, then I have to shut it down whenever the SWR
goes up, making it less practical.
That's why I want so much to know these data!
During this High SWR does the transistor see high voltage or drains high
current. High current is not a problem but high voltage is.
I wonder if high current is still no problem even when the amplifier is
overdriven, say, by 6dB. When the drive is just right for full linear
output, the transistors cannot conduct more than the normal current, so
of course high current isn't a problem. But when there is 6dB (or
perhaps more!) excess drive in a saturated amplifier, the transistors
can conduct twice or more of the normal current. Will they survive that
too? For how long? If I correctly understand what happens with the
parasitic bipolars in a MOSFET, drain current above a certain limit can
turn on the bipolar transistor in a few cells, and that causes instant
failure. How much drain current is guaranteed not to cause this problem,
in a given transistor? Many LDMOSFET datasheets don't state an absolute
maximum drain current!
Note that all the ruggedness testing for the datasheets is done with
well-controlled drive, and NEVER with high-efficiency, moderately
overdriven amplifiers!
Your idea to monitor vds is paramount and rather easy up to few hundred
MHz with a well shielded resistive divider terminated with 50 ohm
connected to an RF cold ground.
Yes, but it's useful only if the transistors can safely clamp
overvoltage for some time, but cannot clamp it for a long time. That
allows triggering the protection if a sudden SWR increase causes high
drain voltage spikes. If instead a transistor cannot safely clamp huge
spikes for long enough, it's pointless to activate the protection afetre
the transistor has already failed... And if it can clamp overvoltage
indefinitely, as long as there is no overheating, then I don't need to
measure drain voltage at all, instead I can simply monitor the
dissipated power to implement full protection.
VLF to MW band transmitters which use switched amplifiers in class D
monitor the sign of the reactance to protect mosfets.
That's to keep the transistors in zero voltage switching mode, I
suppose. Those transmitters often handle many kilowatts of RF power,
while having dissipation capability of only 1kW or less, since they have
such high efficiency that they normally don't need more dissipation
capability. Of course any reduction in efficiency is critical for them.
In my amplifier this will be less critical, because I intend to have a
relatively high dissipation capability built-in, for increased
reliability, even if in normal operation the dissipation should be
rather low.
I have also seen MRF157s failing in the driver of a big SW broadcast
transmitter when there was a flash in the tube. The tube was protected
by switching off the solid state modulator. (Formerly protection used
ignitrons)
A clipper was then added at each transistor drain to limit induced
voltage under Vds max and problems were gone.
Ah, I suspect that those failures were caused by excessive inductance in
the drain circuitry, and shutting down the drivers by cutting off the
bias or the drive! That would cause a huge inductive spike on the drains.
One shouldn't use more drain inductance than strictly necessary, AND one
should make sure to pull down the gates slowly enough so that the drain
overvoltage caused by that inductance remains manageable.
Before connecting your PWM modulator make a full DC sweep of your
amplifier because I remember when we began to design with envelope
tracking (not doing EER or Kahn but tracking few volts above the
strictly necessary drain voltage; the amplifier being in class AB) the
transistor was going into oscillation around 20V DC.
This mosfet (the same generation as the one you planed to use, but he
was climbing to 900 MHz) went into oscillation when the bias was applied
before drain voltage.
Usually the bias is applied when the drain voltage is about 80% under
nominal value to prevent that, but here it is not possible.
This point worries me a lot. I have seen a few (very few) previous
mentions of this LDMOSFET instability happening at low drain voltages,
and I have never found a good explanation for it. Do you happen to know
some more about this? I have seen amplifiers designed with bias circuits
that come on only when the drain supply voltage is above 80% of nominal,
but of course, as you say, I cannot do that. If a device exhibits this
form of instability, and if the instability is internally caused and
cannot be fixed by external feedback or other external means, than that
device simply can't be used in my project. If this phenomenon affects
all LDMOSFETs, then I can pack up and redesign my project around a pair
of 3-500Z...
I advice you to do the test using the current control of your power
supply to sweep the all range voltage while controlling the stability.
I will certainly do that.
Don't forget to design with the decoupling capacitors compatible with
your PWM filter; you may decrease their values severely leading? perhaps
to instabilities.
Yes, I'm very aware of that. The last capacitor of the PWM filter is
actually the drain decoupling capacitor of my RF amp. Physically this
will be a row of roughly 20 ceramic capacitors, totalling slightly under
1 microfarad, placed in extreme proximity to the drains and the source
return. I would like to use C0G/NP0 ceramic, but it's not too easy to
find in the necessary ratings, so the capacitors I have on hand have X7R
dielectric, with 100V rating, 1206 size. Do you have any idea about
their suitability in terms of RF current handling, and capacitance
stability when exposed to the modulated voltage? According to what I can
dig out of datasheets, they should be acceptable, and some tests done by
other hams seem to confirm that, but I haven't done the final test
myself yet.
Since I cannot use high capacitances in the drain circuit, low-frequency
stability must come from negative feedback and from resistive gate
loading, both of which must remain effective down to very low frequencies.
Since I'm a crazy guy, I'm planning to put the drive and predriver on
the same board, for a total of nearly 60dB gain, and I want to see if I
can achieve stability... But I'm mentally prepared to cut the board in
two, if necessary! :-)
I think you will need some linearity correction mostly for low voltages.
From 20 V to 50 V the linearity is fair.
The good thing about integrating this amplifier into an SDR is that
linearity correction of both amplitude and phase, through adaptive
predistortion, is a part of the basic features of the SDR section. On
the hardware side it only requires feeding back a sample of the output
signal into one of the SDR's receivers. All the rest of the job is done
in software, and this software is available for free.
Concerning overdrive as I remember (5 to 6 years ago) in Digital TV
(OFDM) there was around 6 dB clipping and RF peaks always around 2x Vd
while? with adaptive linearity correction peaks were beyond vgs max!.
On HF the gain of an LDMOSFET is higher, so one can have significant
overdrive without having to exceed Vgs max. If my calculations are
right, I will have at least 2V headroom between the absolute maximum
possible drive voltage peak plus bias, and the Vgsmax. Roughly the same
headroom, or a little more, with Vgsmin.
Due to fast acting, your primary protection MUST be hardware for SWR,
over-voltage, over-current and overdrive or ALC. The microcontroller is
for flavor and management of the slow events.
It depends on how fast the protection really needs to be. If I use a
cheap PIC, like the PIC18F886 I have in stock because I use it in many
projects, then every 10-bit analog-digital conversion takes around 2
microseconds, and the processor can execute 5 instructions per
microsecond. AD conversion and CPU processing can run in parallel, but
an event like an antenna failure needs to propagate first through AD
conversion and then through processing. With a well-written program I
think I can get a reaction time of roughly 50 microseconds. That's of
course slower than what an analog circuit could do, but if 50
microseconds is fast enough, then I don't need the expensive analog
multipliers. Until recently I thought that even 200 microseconds was
fast enough, but the more I learn, the more I doubt...
And I do not intend to use the microcontroller for flavor. I won't put a
display on it. If I use it, it will be a little black box hidden deep in
the circuit, doing a very basic slave job. Just the computations
required for the protection system. I don't think I will need it for
anything else, because the SDR does all the other functions, including
things like TX/RX sequencing.
Even the digital Icoms 7300, 7610 use direct analog control for ALC and SWR.
But they don't compute SWR in the protection circuit, let alone
dissipation power!
Also, you can dig interesting informations here:
http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=47&Itemid=145
https://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Dec10/HFE1210_Brounley.pdf
http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Apr04/HFE0404_Brounley.pdf
http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Sep08/HFE0908_Grebennikov.pdf
http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Jun10/HFE0610_Andrei_Part2.pdf
https://www.microsemi.com/document-portal/doc_view/133846-vswr-testing-of-rf-power-mosfets
I did. Thanks!
And if you have classical amps and want to play with:
http://www.highfrequencyelectronics.com/Jun04/HFE0604_Gutierrez.pdf
At least it works with old Mosfets like BLF 278 in class AB
Thanks to SDR, I don't need such a complex correction system.
I hope this helped you a little.
Yes, it did! But I'm still looking for more information, specially for
detailed, hard data on LDMOSFET ruggedness, and body diode behaviour.
Manfred
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http://ludens.cl
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