SLVSER7 October 2020 TPS23731
PRODUCTION DATA
The international standard CISPR 22 (and adopted versions) is often used as a requirement for conducted emissions. Ethernet cables are covered as a telecommunication port under section 5.2 for conducted emissions. Meeting EMI requirements is often a challenge, with the lower limits of Class B being especially hard. Circuit board layout, filtering, and snubbing various nodes in the power circuit are the first layer of control techniques. A more detailed discussion of EMI control is presented in Practical Guidelines to Designing an EMI Compliant PoE Powered Device With Isolated Flyback, SLUA469. Additionally, IEEE 802.3at sections 33.3 and 33.4 and IEEE 802.3bt sections 145.3 and 145.4 have requirements for noise injected onto the Ethernet cable based on compatibility with data transmission.
A technique referred to as frequency dithering can also be used to provide additional EMI measurement reduction. The switching frequency is modulated to spread the narrowband individual harmonics across a wider bandwidth, thus lowering peak measurements.
Fully programmable frequency dithering is a built-in feature of the TPS23731. The oscillator frequency can be dithered by connecting a capacitor from DTHR to RTN and a resistor from DTHR to FRS. An external capacitor, CDTR (Figure 9-1), is selected to define the modulation frequency fm. This capacitor is being continuously charged and discharged between slightly less than 0.5 V and slightly above 1.5 V by a current source/sink equivalent to ~3x the current through FRS pin. CDTR value is defined according to:
fm should always be higher than 9 kHz, which is the resolution bandwidth applied during conducted emission measurement. Typically, fm should be set to around 11 kHz to account for component variations.
The resistor RDTR is used to determine ∆f, which is the amount of dithering, and its value is determined according to:
For example, a 13.2% dithering with a nominal switching frequency of 250 kHz results in frequency variation of ±33 kHz.