Adaptive voltage slew control used to limit the magnitude of broadband conducted noise emissions for buck derived dc-dc converters

This paper demonstrates the harmonic component limiting effects achieved by varying transformer-based dc-dc converter switching device voltage slew rate dV/dt. A solution is realised which is practically feasible to lower the conducted harmonic component emission levels to below -100dBm by reducing the voltage slew rate of a 3W dc-dc converter. Voltage slew rate reduction lowers the harmonic component magnitudes of the trapezoidal waveform at the output of the transformer secondary. A second order LC output filter further reduces harmonic components. The proposed experimental design provides high and low bias voltages to a series of CCD optical arrays for the ESA Gaia satellite. Alternative active gate drive design is also presented to allow adaptive variation of the dV/dt, focusing on higher power level applications.