1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a speaker driver circuit driven by positive and negative voltages.
2. Description of Related Art
FIG. 1 shows a typical structure of a conventional two-channel speaker driver circuit. In order to obtain a maximum dynamic range, the output of such conventional speaker is biased at a nominal DC voltage, which typically is half of a supplied voltage VDD (as an example, VDD=5V and VDD/2=2.5V in the shown figure). However, the DC bias causes significant amount of current to flow into the headphone speaker 16 and 18; this may, in addition to unnecessary power consumption, cause the speaker and the speaker driver to be damaged. Hence, the circuit requires capacitors Cdec to isolate the DC bias, and the capacitance of the capacitor Cdec is considerably large (in the range of several hundred μF).
The output waveform of this conventional headphone is shown in FIG. 2, in which the peak amplitude is VDD, the valley is 0, and the average is VDD/2.
In view of the problems caused by the DC bias, an improvement as shown in FIG. 3 is proposed, in which the low operation level of the two operational amplifiers is set to −VDD, so that the DC bias of the output voltage becomes 0. This eliminates the requirement of the large capacitors, but the circuit requires two operation voltages VDD and −VDD, and it is undesired to provide an additional I/O port for an external input of −VDD. Thus, this prior art proposes a charge pump 10, which converts the supplied voltage VDD to −VDD, so that the circuit only requires one voltage supply. The output waveform of this conventional headphone is shown in FIG. 4, in which the peak amplitude is VDD, the valley is −VDD, and the average is 0.
The second speaker driver circuit described above has the drawbacks that, if the supplied voltage VDD is high, since the output signal amplitude becomes double, the devices need to sustain higher voltage; and the power consumption also becomes double. On the other hand, if the supplied voltage VDD is low, the output signal may not have sufficient power to drive the speaker, and thus the signal amplitude should be enhanced. Accordingly, it is desired to provide a speaker driver circuit capable of generating peak and valley amplitudes of r·VDD and −r·VDD respectively, wherein r is any real number except 1.