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jason9
modified 6 years ago

Class H Power Amplifier

9
10
643
09:37:07
Flip the switch to turn on the circuit. The class AB lifts and drops the zero volt reference point (usually referred to as the ground) of the low-voltage class A to let it achieve high voltages while only consuming the power of the low-voltage 5V sources. The extra power to lift/drop the zero volt reference point is provided by the more efficient class AB. This way, it can achieve the fidelity of the class-A while letting the class-AB do most of the heavy lifting. This is what makes this a class-H. The class A uses about 100W or so regardless of load, and the class AB uses from 10W to 426W depending on the load. At maximum load, about 290W is delivered for an efficiency of 290/(100+426) = 290/526 = 55% which is better than the maximum theoretical efficiency of a pure class A amp, which depending on the design is either 25% efficiency, which corresponds to a constant current source plus a fat output transistor that pulls no current to let the current source push current or pulls a ton of current to overcome the current source and still pull more current after that, or 50% efficiency, which corresponds to a more intelligent design with two fat output transistors with the sum of the current going through them always approximately equal to the maximum output current of the amp. P.S. This has a THD of 0.000004% (2μV / 50V) in the sim. This is in part due to the class A being the main output stage thereby preventing crossover distortion (except for that tiny bit which leaks through from the class AB and is responsible for most of the THD I measured) and in part from the strong negative feedback from the discrete op-amp which greatly decreases THD from all sources.
published 6 years ago
kiani
6 years ago
Efficiency guru.
kiani
6 years ago
Don't actually need to include so many stages to show operation of class AB, on EC. Looks crowded, un necessary.
jason9
6 years ago
Yeah I guess if this is just for demonstration purposes I can remove the extra class-AB output stage stuff.
fatcat2
5 years ago
What is the purpose of the 10nF capacitor?
jason9
5 years ago
It damps high frequency (MHz range) parasitic oscillations. It’ll still work fine even while oscillating, but it can lower the sound quality and emit all kinds of fun RF signals from even short wires which can mess with radios and stuff.
fatcat2
5 years ago
It worsens the slew rate, I guess, adding to the THD at high frequencies. At first sight it seemed like that but then I thought that it's value was a bit of an exaggeration; I usually see such caps in the pF range.
jason9
5 years ago
Well, it’s usually in the pF range because it’s designed to minimize the capacitor as much as possible for ICs since they can’t have caps larger than a few pF and even then they take up like half the die area. Also, the whole point is to reduce the slew rate. When the slew rate is too high the negative feedback overshoots causing it to oscillate. When it’s sufficiently low that isn’t a problem and the negative feedback can work as intended.
fatcat2
5 years ago
It also depends on the max. current drawn by the capacitor. In a circuit using a 125pF cap, the author had quoted that the susceptibility for ringing is very low when the signal frequency is below about 2MHz. It seems that a cap in the pF range can sufficiently attenuate any signal which is below 2MHz but we don't know whether this is true. Is there a way to calculate the slew rate for this class-H amp? Lemme see; seems similar to that of the Lin config.
jason9
5 years ago
I have no idea about any of this. I just put the capacitor there and kept raising the value until it stopped spontaneously oscillating. I could’ve chosen a more sensitive spot so I could use a lower capacitor value (by taking advantage of the miller effect) but I didn’t bother.
fatcat2
5 years ago
Yup

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