A -91 dB THD+N Resistor-Less Class-D Piezoelectric Speaker Driver Using a Dual Voltage/ Current Feedback for LC Resonance Damping

Abstract

Piezoelectric speakers are gaining popularity on account of their improving form-factor and audio quality, making them a good fit for many audio applications such as in televisions, laptops, etc. Such speakers can be modelled as a large capacitive load, and so are typically driven by a Class-AB amplifier via a series resistor that ensures driver stability, and limits load current, but wastes power [1], [2]. In [3], the Class-AB amplifier is replaced by a more power-efficient Class-D amplifier (CDA) in series with an additional inductor. However, a series resistor is still required to damp the resulting LC resonant circuit, which could otherwise draw excessive currents when excited by large-signal distortion (e.g. clipping) harmonics around the LC resonance frequency. Alternatively, by using a feed-forward architecture based on LC filter diagnostics to limit overshoot currents, the series resistor can be replaced by a second inductor, at the expense of increased system complexity and cost [4].