Power Line Communication in Digitally Controlled DC–DC Converters Using Switching Frequency Modulation

This paper investigates power line communication (PLC) in digitally controlled high-frequency switched-mode power supplies in distributed architectures that share the same bus voltage. Communication between different DC-DC converters is obtained by using switching frequency modulation and by detecting the switching signal on the common supply bus voltage. In case of low power transmission, a small duty-cycle perturbation at half of switching frequency is added to enhance the energy of the transmitted signal. Each converter operates at three different switching frequencies: the first is associated with bit 1 transmission, the second is associated with bit 0 transmission, and the third is associated with no transmission state. In the proposed solution, there is no need for an additional power amplifier in order to inject the communication signal on the power lines, but the signal used for the PLC is inherently generated by the pulsewidth modulation of DC-DC converters. Even if aimed at a dedicated digital IC, the communication architecture has been implemented in field-programmable gate arrays. Simulation and experimental results on DC-DC synchronous buck converters confirm that the performance is achievable by the proposed PLC techniques.