SWITCHING RIPPLE DATA TRANSFER TECHNIQUE USING STEP-DOWN DC-DC CONVERTER

This paper describes an electronic communication method based on the use of the DC-DC converter as a data transfer device. Output voltage of a DC-DC converter is modulated with Amplitude-Shift Keying (ASK) signal carrier. Modulation takes place in the feedback loop of the DC-DC converter. The output signal passes through the transition line to the band pass filter, where unexpected noise and DC components are removed. Transition line is represented as a long wire with a certain length that contains active and reactive parasitic parameters. These parameters affect Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the initial ASK signal waveform. Switching ripple communications are introduced to simplify electrical connection and reduce the wire count. This makes it particularly suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications in challenging environments where RF may be weak or unreliable. Nowadays wiring is an expensive part of electronic products. Industry leading companies usually spend sufficient resources on wiring production and installation work. Switching ripple communication modules can reduce a final product price and increase reliability. Also, these systems can be easily implemented to existing designs because power line communication devices do not require additional signal pass conductors or additional RF modules for data transfer. The proposed communication method can be used in such industries as: battery management systems, industrial lightning control, automotive or even in high performance power supplies for telecom solutions. The purpose of this paper is to create a signal transfer model and show a dependency between transition wire length and total harmonic distortion parameter, which affects output signal. Low THD parameter is important for carrier signal decode operations. After the filtering stage ASK signal usually passes to the Microcontroller unit through the Analog to Digital converter (ADC) block. By increasing carrier signal THD the ADC effective number of bits (ENOB) parameter will be affected. As a result, all further signal processing stages such as digital filtering and calculations will take more hardware resources.