What is a bias power supply comprising a "relaxation oscillator"

Hello,

I have to make a Power supply which must provide Vout = 10V and Iout = 15mA

Vin is a 3v6 battery.

The chief engineer asked me how i would do this..........so i said i would either use a monolithic boost converter or a charge pump.

...but the chief engineer replied that actually i should use a bias power supply based on a "relaxation oscillator"


.....i am not sure what they meant.....do you know what it means?

I can imagine many circuits belonging to this category, e.g. self oscillating inductive voltage converters. I guess, the battery suggest an efficient converter and this will be most likely a modern integrated boost converter with low quiescent current and voltage regulation.

treez said:

...but the chief engineer replied that actually i should use a bias power supply based on a "relaxation oscillator"

Click to expand...

This is the sort of thing a higher-up might say that would make me suspect he's testing me.

Perhaps he meant a bipolar power supply? Or maybe he was using terms that lean toward doing this job without coils and inductors?

Anyway something close to a relaxation oscillator would be to use it to chop the 3.6VDC by running it through an H-bridge.

Over the years I have tried (simulated) a large assortment of charge pumps and voltage multipliers. There's a chance this method can work, as far as turning 3.6V into 10V.

Here is a screenshot showing how an H-bridge could provide square waves at 3.6V, to a 6-stage voltage multiplier commonly known as a Villard type. The output can rise above 10V at 15 mA.



The 17 ohm resistor depicts about the greatest source resistance that would still pass large enough current pulses to power the network.

The diodes need to be low barrier type, although this might be flexible depending on the amplitude of square waves coming from the H-bridge.

A relaxation oscillator is a historical device which is a neon tube with a current limiting resistor being fed from a HV DC. The tube has a capacitor across it. On switch on, the cap starts to charge, when it reaches the strike voltage of the tube, the neon fires and discharges the cap to the tube's extinction voltage. The neon then "relaxes" and the process then repeats. Is your boss older then 60?
Frank

boss was over 18 in 1973, so i can work out boss's age...thanks

As already mentioned, I believe that many different circuits can be subsumed under "relaxation" oscillator, the classical glow-discharge lamp circuit being only one of them. Also astable multivibrators are sometimes designated relaxation oscillators. They can be clearly distinuished from harmonic oscillators, a positive definition is less clear, I think. A cicruit type that is particularly suited for voltage boosting is the blocking oscillator, closely related to the relaxation principle in my view.