© Global Silicon 2003

Servo Controls and Applications, Global Silicon Control Engineering Group

August 2003

Methods for Measuring Anti-Shock Performance, A Technical Description of the

Active G-Shock System and its Application to Consumer Audio CD Portable
Products.
Morgan James Colmer
Global Silicon R&D Labs, Cambridge, UK, CB8 7SG

controller at the correct point on the disc, when

1.0 Abstract
In the design and manufacture of portable CD
(Compact Disc) products for the consumer
audio market, a number of issues arise from
the effects of external disturbances on the
quality of the system. Often these issues are
hard to quantity objectively and one is often
required to resort to the subjective results of
testing the overall perceived listening
experience of the consumer. This is often
difficult to reconcile with the rigid world of the
servo control engineer where performance
indices and measurements are the cornerstones
of progress. This paper outlines a technique
for measuring the overall effects of external
disturbances upon the level of system
performance and gives and example of a
proprietary system design for achieving
optimal shock insensitivity with performance
indications.
a disturbance causes a discontinuity in the
data, the time taken to recover to the point in
the data stream where the disturbance occurred
will determine the amount of data buffer left in
reserve. When the system is subjected to
multiple shock events, this parameter can be
very important.
2.1 Disc Speed Effects
The time that the servo system will take to fill
the buffer, when operated at a speed greater
than real time, can be found by applying
equation 1, where T f is the time taken to fill
the buffer in seconds, Bm is the buffer size in
bytes,  r is the data compression ratio, Dnorm
is the normal real-time data rate (in this case
176400 bytes per second) and  d is the disc
speed relative to the real-time speed.

2.0 Introduction Bm  r
Tf  (1)
Dnorm  d  1
The terms used within industry for systems and
techniques to improve the shock sensitivity Clearly, if  d becomes unity the equation will
vary, are for are G-Shock, Jog-resistant, Anti-
Jog and ESP but for the purposes of this paper blow up to infinity because of the term  d  1
they are all considered to have the same becoming zero.
common aims, i.e. that of reducing the
2.2 Buffer Compression
sensitivity to external perturbations by state of
the art servo control techniques. As with any consumer application, audio
systems are cost sensitive and algorithmic
Some of these techniques make use of data
techniques are often employed to increase the
buffering to allow the system controller to
utilisation of the finite buffer memory. This
instruct the servo mechanism to re-read the
comes at an expense of silicon area (or MIPS
data lost upon a shock event and in order to fill
in the software implementation) and generally
the buffer in real time applications, other
power consumption. There are a number of
systems will read the data into the buffer at
techniques available to designers of these type
speeds greater than that required by real time
of systems but ADPCM (adaptive differential
audio playback, and hence have a net surplus
pulse code modulation) is almost exclusively
of data. These systems will invariably disable
used due to its relatively simple
the servo controller, and hence the data, once
implementation and low impact upon the SNR
the buffer has been filled. After a
of the audio signal. In cost sensitive
predetermined period of time (often optimised
applications, the quality reduction will be
to save power on battery operated devices) the
negligible for this lossy compression
servo system will begin reading the data until
technique. Typical systems achieve 4:1
the buffer is filled again. Another area that is
compression ratios using ADPCM, which for
often optimised to achieve a high level of
CD 16-bit PCM means that every audio sample
shock protection is the time taken by the non-
is represented as a 4-bit binary code. Buffer
linear servo controller to re-start the linear
compression techniques have become a very
© Global Silicon 2003

important method of increasing the apparent c

buffer size, which will add to the shock H (s)  (2)
s  wc
handling capability of a system.
2.3 Jog Recovery Generally, anti-vibration mounts have a first
order transfer function, however there are
When any portable CD appliance is subjected cases when a 2nd order (mass-spring-damper)
to a large enough shock, the servo system will system is used to suppress high frequency
be caused to lose tracking and focus. The disturbances which has a transfer function
traditional techniques for shock protection given in equation 3.
make this assumption and then attempt to use
the non-linear servo controller to get the c 2
H (s)  (3)
system back on track as soon as possible, the s 2  2 c   c 2
more quickly a system can be brought back to
the point in the data stream where the shock
occurred, the less data will be expended from
the data buffer. The time taken to recover to 3.0 Overall Figure of Merit
the correct point in the data stream will need to
With so many factors affecting the
be averaged over a number of shock events to
performance of a CD servo system when it is
obtain the mean recovery time, generally
subject to a shock event. We have found that
represented as T . all three factors discussed in this paper are
2.4 Shock Resistance relevant, that of disc speed  d , Jog recovery
Not all external disturbances will cause the time T and servo shock resistance  g . For
system to lose tracking and/or focus with the the elements of d and  g , the performance
disc, any disturbance that is outside of the
performance envelope of the linear servo is directly proportional whereas for the
controller will cause a jog event, and to be recovery time, the performance is inversely
beyond the servo controllers capabilities means proportional, hence all three factors can be
that the disturbance was beyond the loop integrated into an overall figure of merit for
bandwidth or exceeded the level afforded by the systems robustness to external shock
the phase/gain margin of the controller. Given events. Combining all of these factors into a
that the shock sensitivity is not constant with product of these parameters yields equation 4,
all servo controllers, a figure of merit can be where  is a dimensionless variable that
extended to it and this quantity should be represents the shock performance for a CD
directly related to the external shock event. servo controller.
The mechanical shock experienced by a
 d g
system can be expressed as the force exerted  (4)
and the time over which it is exerted. It is also T
important to characterise the frequency range
over which the force is applied. Generally, the 3.1 Worked Example
quantity used to measure such events is Taking a typical CD servo controller (taken
expressed as G/ms, which represents the force from Rohm datasheet) we can find the 3 key
(in G units) exerted in 1 ms of time in a figures for the level of performance with
sinusoidal force profile. The Peak G force respect to shock.
exerted in this time/shape window is the figure
denoted, usually defined by the unit  g . All  d  2 .3
CD mechanisms have some kind of anti T  1sec
vibration mounting which has two properties  g  3G / ms
(i) the peak amplitude of higher frequency
disturbances is reduced and (ii) the bandwidth Which when applied to equation 4, gives a
over which the disturbance is active is reduced. figure of merit of: -
A typical anti-vibration mount has the transfer
 d g
function given in equation 2, where H (s ) is the 
T
transfer function represented in the complex
frequency plane, c is the natural frequency of   6.9
the anti-vibration mount (to the -3dB gain
point) and s is the complex frequency operator.
© Global Silicon 2003
4.0 Active G-Sense Technology
The following is a technical description of the
AGS (Active G-Sense) system used in the Xin
servo controller software to improve the shock
performance of the CD system.
4.1 Background
A CD servo controller is a system that is used
to keep the focus and tracking signals
minimised to their zero mean point. These
servo controllers have to reject extraneous
signals coming from a number of sources,
which include, non-centred disc (eccentricity
and vertical deviation), disc defects and
external shock events. The ability of the linear
servo systems to cope with these effects is
broadly governed by three factors, phase
margin m , gain margin Gm and loop
bandwidth  n .
The phase margin is a figure of merit that
represents the difference in the phase at the
open loop unity gain crossover point and 180
degrees, the point where the system becomes
unstable. In typical CD servo controllers, the
phase margin is usually in the 30 – 40 degrees
region. It is a common misconception that a
higher phase margin will always result in a
better system, and although this is generally
true, there are a number of important provisos
to this rule.
The systems gain margin is the amount of gain
between the point where the open loop
response dips below unity and where the phase
reaches zero. This overhead gives the system a
greater ability to cope with system tolerance
and this figure is between 6 and 18 dB for
typical servo controller systems.
The loop bandwidth is the frequency at which
the open loop gain response crosses unity. The
higher this figure, the greater the range of
disturbance frequencies the system can cope
with. One problem with a loop bandwidth that
is too high is that the system noise will not be
rejected by the controller and be passed to the
focus and tracking actuators as drive signals
which will result in (i) poor quality data (ii)
Audio noise on the servo actuators (iii)
excessive power consumption.
It is relatively simple to achieve either a high
phase margin or a high loop bandwidth but to
achieve both of these together is less than
trivial. A high phase margin will add damping
to the servo control response in the time
domain according to equation 5, where  is
the damping factor and m is the phase
margin.
m
  (5)
100
4.2 Description
In any CD servo control system, there will be
an optimum point where the control effort will
balance a number of performance criteria,
however this point will not necessarily be the
point where the shock sensitivity is optimised.
In fact it can easily be shown that in any CD
servo system, factors such as phase margin
will compete with shock sensitivity for the
ideal system settings. Given this limitation,
we can either set our system for maximum
resistance to defects and disc imperfections or
we can set it for ideal shock resistance.
The Global Silicon G-Shock system utilised in
the Xin processor uses patented technology
(patent numbers GB101427, WO202376,
US208990, US208991, CN208992, IN208993
and EP208994), which allows for both shock
resistance and good playability. At the heart
of this system is a shock detection system that
senses any external disturbances and prevents
any disc defects from giving false trigger
events and then adjusts the loop gain to
increase the loop bandwidth for the duration of
the shock event. This allows the Global
Silicon servo controller to achieve both good
playability of disc defects and ideal shock
sensitivity.
The diagram below (figure 1) shows how the
shock detector will control the servo to a
higher gain upon detecting a shock event.
When the shock is within the frequency range
of a band-pass filter (typically from 100 Hz to
2 KHz) the shock detector will trigger if the
level of the disturbance is above a pre-
programmed threshold. The gain (Ks) will
typically be switched to a higher gain of
between 6 and 12 dB, depending upon the
headroom determined by the gain margin.
Figure 1
© Global Silicon 2003

4.3 Summary
Based upon the figure of merit given by
equation 4, we can determine the system's
performance with the use of the G-sense
system. Remembering that the figure of merit
can be expressed as:
 d g

T
We can calculate figure of merit for the Active
G-Shock system. First the figures for the
Global Silicon servo controller need to be
obtained, these are: -
 d  1 .5
T  1sec
 g  5G / ms

This then yields a figure of merit of

  7.5
Clearly, adding the Active G-Shock system
allows the Global Silicon Xin controller to
have superior anti-shock performance at lower
disc speeds, which give better all-round disc
playability.
Perhaps the key enabling technology behind
the Global Silicon Active G-Shock system is
the fact that the servo controller is completely
software driven. Software can be rapidly
adapted to solve new challenges in the CD
player as they arise. Despite the CD system
being a very old technology, it is constantly
evolving to cope with the constantly reducing
quality of commercial CD’s. In the age of the
consumer being able to by a CD-R for less
than $0.10, the quality of the discs available is
now far below the specification drawn up by
Philips in the 1970’s. With CD-R and CD-RW
discs becoming commonplace this trend looks
likely to continue and the benefits of a
software servo controller will continue to keep
Global Silicon ahead of competition.
5.0 The Author
Morgan Colmer is CTO for Global Silicon Ltd.