The purpose of this paper is to propose a flexible load-dependent digital soft-start control method for dc-dc converters in a 380Vdc system. The soft-start operation is needed to prevent negative effects such as large inrush current and output overshoot to a power supply in the start-up process of dc-dc converters. In the conventional soft-start operation, a dc-dc converter has a very slow start-up to deal with the light load condition. Therefore, it always takes a long time in any load condition to start up a power supply and obtain the desired output. In the proposed soft-start control method, the speed of the start-up process is flexibly controlled depending on the load condition. To obtain the optimal speed for any load condition, the speed of the soft-start is determined from a approximated function of load current, which is estimated from experiment results in advance. The proposed soft-start control method is evaluated both in simulations and experiments. From results, it is confirmed that the proposed method has superior soft-start characteristics compared to the conventional one.

This paper analyzes performances of trellis coded(TC) 8PSK modulation in Rician fading channels to optimize parameters of Viterbi decoders. The computer simulation clarifies that when carrier power to multipath power ratio (C/M) equals 10dB, Pe performance with reasonable length interleaving depends on free Euclidean distance (dfree) but not on effective code length(ECL) in a practical range of bit error probability (Pe= 10-3-10-4). In the case of C/M=5dB, the effect of ECL appears in the range of bit energy to noise power density ratio (Eb/No)C/M (=5dB). Therefore, for domestic mobile satellite communication systems for non-high latitude countries, only dfree must be considered for TC8PSK Viterbi decoder design. Moreover, to improve Pe performance in slow fading environment, pre-Viterbi-decoding maximal ratio combining is proposed. The proposed diversity scheme improves required Eb/No to achieve Pe=10-4 by more than 6dB compared with no interleaving and more than 2.5 dB compared with interleaving.