Realization of an adaptive voltage driver for voice coil motor

In this paper we describe a head servo-positioning system for hard disk drives (HDDs), in which the usual current command for the voice coil motor has been replaced by a simpler voltage command. This solution has proven advantages in terms of cost, since the voltage driver does not require any resistive shunt for current measurement and phase-shaping passive networks for the current controller. Also, it requires a lower pin count and can be easily implemented with a PWM power stage. The voltage driver consists of a voltage-controlled power stage, with a pre-filter placed at its input, plus a back e.m.f. feed-forward compensator. The role of the pre-filter is to provide a transfer function between input signal and VCM current as close as possible to that of a standard current loop, so providing a one-to-one replacement to standard current drivers. To achieve this, it can be shown that the filter must cancel out the low-frequency pole of the VCM, located in a position which depends on the electrical impedance of the VCM itself. This, however, may change by ±30% during HDD operations, due to self-heating and consequent variation of the VCM resistance. Such variation may lead to an unsatisfactory performance of the voltage driver, so an adaptation mechanism, capable of tracking variations of VCM coil resistance, must be set up. This paper presents an on-line estimation procedure, based on an extended Kalman filter (EKF), capable of estimating the VCM coil resistance with a high degree of accuracy. EKF, however, usually brings a high computational load, making it unsuitable for real-time, low-cost embedded applications. The paper presents two reduced-order model of the VCM, for which the EKF can be implemented with 30 and 50% less computational effort, respectively, while maintaining a good estimate of the VCM coil resistance. The paper reports experimental results of VCM resistance estimation, obtained with the proposed algorithm, running in 30 μS on a 25 MHz, fixed-point DSP. Also, the on-line estimation is used to adapt the pre-filter. Experimental results show that the servo performance with adaptive voltage driver is not affected by resistance variation and equivalent to that of the standard current driver. © Springer-Verlag 2005