User:Peranders/Jung super regulator

About
I thought this subject was interesting enough to write an article but the result was it was too "narrow" so I will have this page on my own account here. May I introduce myself.

I work as a design engineer at a big consulting company and my "thing" is power electronics, general analog and digital electronics and some tiny bit of programming microcontrollers.

As a hobby I design audio related designs such as RIAA vinyl amplifiers, headphone amplifiers and yes, super regulators.

Cheers Per-Anders Sjöström

Introduction
The Jung Super Regulator or the Super Regulator is a power-supply regulator for electronical devices. It is mostly used in high end audio and certainly in the DIY audio area. It's rather rare in industrial applications because of it's complexity and by that the cost and not to mention the size.

In the DIY audio community it is used very often for tweaking CD or DVD players. You can also see it together with phono (RIAA) amps.

Background
In 1995, Mr. Walt Jung brought up this kind of regulator into publicity. He described it in a very long article series in the magazine The Audio Amateur. The topology has been known for decades but there isn't any info available where and when the super regulator was seen for the first time. (Maybe someone can email the author?) The picture below is a super regulator formed as a dual supply but it can be made as a single if you want. The 709 opamp is ancient but it could be replaced with almost any type and of course better type. Let's pretend that you have generic parts with "general" properties.

Mr Bob Pease has dug up an ancient tube super regulator. It was designed in the early sixties. Tube super regulator

About the name
The topology is called on the internet "Jung Super Regulator" mainly because Mr. Walt Jung made it well-known and things on the net has the tendency to create such names so if you speak of a regulator with that name you mean a certain type of regulator. You can also see the name Super Regulator which often is a regulator looking similar like this one. Neither the name Jung Super regulator nor Super Regulator is any scientific name, it has only been used by sufficiently many people.

Interesting features
It has a very high performance when it comes to speed and output impedance. It has also very low noise, in fact extremely low noise.

Why high performance?
A couple of interesting design features makes this regulator type a bit more high performning than others:


 * The power to the opamp (the error amp) is taken from the regulated side
 * The reference voltage takes it's power from the regulated side.
 * The driver for the series or pass transistor runs in class A which increases the speed of the output element.

Description
The circuit is rather complex bespite the "simpleness" but it will be explained in detail below. .... soon...