Design and Development of Class-D Audio Power Amplifiers Laboratory Kit for an Electronic Engineering Education

A class-D audio power amplifier laboratory kit has been developed and tested for an electronic engineering education. The laboratory kit consists of EVAL-SSM2380Z - development board, Arduino Uno R3 microcontroller board and several passive components, used to support the proper dynamic operation. The key component of the developed kit is a SM2380 monolithic class-D power amplifier that uses Σ-Δ modulation to determine the switching pattern of the output waveforms. The microcontroller board is based on an ATmega328 AVR microcontroller and is used to produce the I2C control interface to SM2380. Moreover, with the laboratory kit it is possible to study the basic electrical characteristics and parameters of Class-D power amplifier at autonomous and programmable operational modes. In addition it is possible to test the mode of automatic level control of the output signal according to a reference value. The proposed laboratory kit is intended to students from master degree program “Electronics engineering”, studied in the Technical University of Sofia.