Studies On Delay Jitter Of Quick Pulsed Discharge Circuit

High repetition rate, long lifetime and other advantages of all solid state magnetic compression discharge circuit made it widely applied in pulsed power technology, especially for the excimer lasers in lithography. With the increasing requirements on linewidth and power of the lithography light source, double cavity structures become the primary selection for the excimer lasers applied in lithography. This kind of system is very sensitive to the time synchronous between the two cavities. Therefore, how to reduce the discharge delay jitter of all solid state magnetic compression discharge circuit becomes important.The research of this paper was based on a home-made quick pulsed discharge circuit. According to the discharge experiments of the circuit, we analyzed the reasons for discharge jitter and found that using a special two stage coupled reset circuit could decrease the jitter effectively. In order to find out the working mechanism of reset circuit and control the discharge jitter, we used the PSpice software to simulate the circuit. The simulation of the whole circuit was made by establishing the magnetic switch model and the saturable transformer model with the practical B-H loop, and the charging source model with the ABM part. According to the results, it showed that a variation of 1 V on charging voltage of storage capacitor caused 5-10 ns jitter of discharge delay. It was also confirmed that the discharge jitter could be reduced from microsecond level to nanosecond level by applying the reset circuit. The key factor to reduce the jitter is that the magnetic cores can be reset to a steady state before the discharge period by the reset circuits.By studying the winding direction, winding turns, the inductance in the reset circuit and the frequency of charging current, it was found that the reset circuit could reduce the jitter to 86 ns with the appropriate parameter and even could be 36 ns by the introduction of a reset current source in the second circuit. We also studied the stray inductance in the main circuit and the winding turns of the magnetic switches and the transformer. In order to simulate the charging power supply precisely, we calculated the relevant parameters and designed a control circuit for the charging circuit by measuring the experimental data. It was confirmed that the simulation results was more closed to the practical circuits. These simulation models can provide a reference to the design of low jitter pulsed discharge circuit.