JAJU858 December 2022
For this design, the MSP430F5131 MCU is chosen for the high clock speed required for timer capture DC fault detection. The timer capture method directly measured duty cycle changes by triggering a timer on each duty cycle edge, so a high clock speed was required. This timer capture method is used in many existing RCD modules. Alternatively, a lower BOM cost is possible by reading DC fault with an ADC instead of using the timer capture method.
The most important specification of MCU selection is the integrated ADC. The ADC must have an effective resolution small enough to consistently differentiate between a fault. This design sees a 200-mV filter output during a 6-mA DC fault, and 600-mV maximum filter output during an 30-mARMS AC fault(1). This design uses a 10-bit ADC with a full scale range of 1.5 V integrated in the MSP430F5131 MCU.
The ADC needs a sample speed faster than 2000 samples per second. The software stores the low value read by the ADC and uses the low value to determine if an AC or DC fault occurred. The ADC must sample quickly enough to consistently detect a low value during an AC waveform to differentiate AC versus DC fault.
The largest source of noise is the ADC reference voltage error. This design has a total reference voltage error of 1.5%. The fault detection signal needs to be amplified as much as possible to make this error less significant.