Impact of PWM Duty Cycle Jitter on Switching-Mode Power Converter Efficiency

The objective of this paper is to propose an efficiency model to evaluate the impact of the pulse width modulation (PWM) duty cycle jitter on the efficiency of switching-mode power converter. By taking the product of two perturbation terms into consideration, which is ignored in the conventional average small-signal model, the average efficiency model is proposed first. Due to the nonlinear characteristic of the PWM generator, the multifrequency efficiency model is also developed by considering the sideband frequency. Three different perturbation waves are induced to the control loop of the converter to generate the jitter to observe its impact on the efficiency. The mathematical expression of the efficiency drop based on the proposed multifrequency model is derived. The reason of control-to-output gain's magnitude spike on the Bode plot can be explained by the derived equations. Eventually, the methods to reduce the efficiency drop caused by the jitter are suggested. In spite of various perturbation frequencies, amplitudes, and waveforms, the mathematical calculation, the computer simulation, and the hardware measurement of the efficiency drop are consistent which validate the accuracy of the proposed multifrequency efficiency model.