The UCD3138 is a digital power supply controller from Texas Instruments offering superior levels of integration and performance in a single-chip solution. The flexible nature of the UCD3138 makes it suitable for a wide variety of power conversion applications. In addition, multiple peripherals inside the device have been specifically optimized to enhance the performance of AC-DC and isolated DC-DC applications and reduce the solution component count in the IT and network infrastructure space.

The UCD3138 controller is a fully programmable solution offering customers complete control of their application, along with ample ability to differentiate their solution. At the same time, TI is committed to simplifying our customers’ development effort by offering best-in-class development tools, including application firmware, Code Composer Studio™ software development environment, and TI’s power development GUI which lets customers configure and monitor key system parameters.

At the core of the UCD3138 controller are the digital control loop peripherals, also known as Digital Power Peripherals (DPPs). Each DPP implements a high-speed digital control loop consisting of a dedicated Error Analog-to-Digital Converter (EADC), a PID-based 2-pole/2-zero digital compensator and DPWM outputs with 250-ps pulse width resolution. The device also contains a 12-bit, 267-ksps general-purpose ADC with up to 14 channels, timers, interrupt control, PMBus, and UART communications ports. The device is based on a 32-bit ARM7TDMI-S RISC microcontroller that performs real-time monitoring, configures peripherals, and manages communications. The ARM microcontroller executes its program out of programmable flash memory as well as on-chip RAM and ROM.

In addition to the FDPP, specific power management peripherals have been added to enable high efficiency across the entire operating range, high integration for increased power density, reliability, and lowest overall system cost and high flexibility with support for the widest number of control schemes and topologies. Such peripherals include: light load burst mode, synchronous rectification, LLC and phase-shifted full bridge mode switching, input voltage feed forward, copper trace current sense, ideal diode emulation, constant current constant power control, synchronous rectification soft on and off, peak current mode control, flux balancing, secondary side input voltage sensing, high-resolution current sharing, hardware-configurable soft start with pre bias, as well as several other features. Topology support has been optimized for voltage mode and peak current mode controlled phase-shifted full bridge, single and dual phase PFC, bridgeless PFC, hard-switched full bridge and half bridge, and LLC half bridge and full bridge.