Aperiodic pulse-modulation technique to reduce peak EMI in impedance-source DC-DC converters

• Published in: 2017 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE) pp. 5369 - 5374
• Main Authors: Hasan, Saad Ul, Kafle, Yuba Raj, Town, Graham E.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.10.2017
• Subjects: DC-DC power converters; Electromagnetic interference; electromagnetic interference (EMI); Gallium nitride; gallium nitride (GaN); HEMTs; high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT); Modulation; pulse-position modulation (PPM); pulse-width modulation (PWM); quazi-Z-source (qZS); Switches; Switching frequency; wide-bandgap (WBG)
• DOI: 10.1109/ECCE.2017.8096899

The use of wide-bandgap (WBG) devices in power converters provides several advantages in terms of efficiency, power density and low cooling requirements. However, a potential unwanted side-effect is the increased electromagnetic interference (EMI) noise, the basis of which is the high di/dt and dv/dt realized by the characteristic sharp rise and fall switching offered by the WBG power switches. To suppress the EMI, this paper presents a generic framework for the generation of an aperiodic carrier signal, which can be extended to drive multiple switched power converters. The aperiodic modulation scheme is implemented in a MATLAB Simulink environment and realized on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) development board through an auto-code generation feature offered by a hardware description language (HDL) coder. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed aperiodic modulation methodology has been tested on a quasi-Z-source DC-DC converter. A 9 dB suppression in the peak conducted EMI emissions was demonstrated with no adverse impact on the voltage gain and efficiency of the power converter.