Critical Equivalent Series Resistance Estimation for Voltage Regulator Stability Using Hybrid System Identification and Neural Network

Output capacitor in the voltage regulator (VR) circuit ensures stability especially during fast load transients. However, the capacitor parasitic, namely equivalent series resistance (ESR), may cause unstable VR operation. VR characterization in terms of ESR suggests stable range of capacitor ESR based on the ESR tunnel graph in the VR datasheet. Specifically, the stable ESR range is the critical ESR value, which lies on the failure region boundary of ESR tunnel graph. New or updated ESR tunnel graph through characterization is required for new product development or quality assurance purpose. However, the characterization is typically conducted manually in industry, thereby increases the manufacturing time and cost. Therefore, this work proposed a characterization approach that can reduce the time to determine the ESR tunnel graph based on the hybrid system identification and neural network (SI-NN) approach. This method utilised system identification (SI) to estimate the VR circuit model for certain operating points before predicting the transfer function coefficients for the remaining points using radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). Eventually, the critical ESR of failure region boundary was estimated. This hybrid SI-NN approach able to reduce the number of data that would be acquired manually to 25% compared to manual characterization, while provides critical ESR estimation with error less than 2%.