Wireless medical telemetry service (WMTS) is an important wireless communication system in healthcare facilities. Recently, the potential for electromagnetic interference by noise emitted by switching regulators installed in light-emitting diode (LED) lamps has been a serious problem. In this study, we evaluated the characteristics of the electromagnetic noise emitted from LED lamps and its effect on WMTS. Switching regulators generally emit wide band impulsive noise whose bandwidth reaches 400MHz in some instances owing to the switching operation, but this impulsive nature is difficult to identify in the reception of WMTS because the bandwidth of WMTS is much narrower than that of electromagnetic noise. Gaussian approximation (GA) can be adopted for band-limited electromagnetic noise whose characteristics have no repetitive variation. On the other hand, GA with the impulsive correction factor (ICF) can be adopted for band-limited electromagnetic noise that has repetitive variation. We investigate the minimum receiver sensitivity of WMTS for it to be affected by electromagnetic noise emitted from LED lamps. The required carrier-to-noise power ratio (CNR) of Gaussian noise and electromagnetic noise for which GA can be adopted was approximately 15dB, but the electromagnetic noise for which GA with the ICF can be adopted was 3 to 4dB worse. Moreover, the spatial distribution of electromagnetic noise surrounding an LED lamp installation was measured. Finally, we roughly estimated the offset distance between the receiving antenna of WMTS and LED lamps when a WMTS signal of a certain level was added in a clinical setting using our experimental result for the required CNR.

An on-chip soft-start circuit based on a switched-capacitor for DC-DC switching regulator is presented. A ramp-voltage, which is generated by a switched-capacitor, is used to make pulse width slowly increase from zero, in order to eliminate the inrush current and the overshoot voltage during start-up. The post simulation results show that the regulator soft starts well with the proposed soft-start circuit.

Sawtooth wave generator which has very steep down-slope and little amplitude and oscillation frequency error, is proposed. Because the down-slope is achieved by switching two triangular waves exclusively, the shape of the down-slope becomes very steep. The proposed method realizes not only the steep down-slope but also less amplitude error and less oscillation frequency error compared with conventional method. Spectre simulations are performed by using 0.18 µm CMOS process and transient simulation results show the proposed circuit has quite less amplitude and frequency error for 5 MHz oscillation compared with the conventional method.

This paper describes a simple, inexpensive technique for intentionally broadening and flattening the spectrum of a DC-DC converter (switching regulator) to reduce Electro-Magnetic Interference (EMI). This noise spectrum broadening technique involves intentionally introducing pseudo-random dithering of control clock timing, which can be achieved by adding simple digital circuitry. This technique can significantly reduce noise power spectrum peaks at the DC-DC converter output. For our test case circuit, measurements showed that noise power was reduced by 5.7 dBm at the main peak, by 15.6 dBm at the second peak and by 12.8 dBm at the third peak. This simple, inexpensive technique can be applied to most conventional switching regulators by adding simple digital circuitry, and without any modification of the design of other parts.

This paper analyses the amplification characteristics of a two-loop controlled switching power amplifier for a digital portable telephone and presents the amplifier which has a flat gain and small phase delay from dc to 100kHz. This amplifier is a modification of a switching regulator and it uses two-loop control to achieve a wideband amplification characteristic. Optimum amplification characteristics, however, can't be designed by using the conventional method for designing a switching regulator because a flat gain and small phase delay in an amplification characteristic has not been considered for most switching regulators. This paper analyses in detail the small-signal transfer functions of the switching power amplifier and shows the behaviour of zero and poles. It also shows the boundary condition of large-signal operation. A new design procedure of a switching power amplifier is presented, and the analytical results are verified by experiments.