Power switch and driving

I used d2pak 70V 80A 0.004 ohms ultrafets (Fairchind semiconductor), very expensive and hard to find. In principle any fet will work, but the lower the on-resistance, the lower the on-state conduction losses, the lower the heat produced on the fets, the higher efficiency and smaller the heatsinks needed. With this fets i am able to run the fets with small heatsinks and without fan at full rated power (100W) with an efficiency of 82% and perceptible heating and with small heating at 120W (some degrees) (the core starts to saturate and the efficiency is a bit lower, around 75%)

Try to use the lowest resistance mosfet you can put your dirty hand :-) on or the efficiency will be lower than rated and you will need even a small fan. The fet driver i used is the TPS2811P, from Texas instruments, rated for 2A peak and 200ns. Is important that the gate drive is optimized for minimal inductance or the switching losses will be higher and you risk noise coupling from other sources. Personally i think that twisted pair wires (gate and ground/source) are the best to keep the inductance small. Place the gate drive resistor near the Mosfet, not near the IC.

Controller

I used the trusty TL494 PWM controller with frequency set at around 40-60 Khz adjustable with a potentiometer. I also implemented the soft start (to reduce powerup transients). The adjust potentiometer (feedback) must be set to obtain the desired voltage. The output signals is designed with two pull-up resistors on the collector of the PWM chip output transistor pulling them to ground each cycle alternatively. This signal is sent to the dual inverting MOSFET driver (TPS2811P) obtaining the correct waveform.

Power and filtering

How i said before the power tracks must be heavy gauged or you will scarify regulation (since it depends of transformer step up ratio and input voltage) and efficiency too. Don't forget to place a 10A (or 15A) fuse on the input because the car batteries can supply very high currents in case of shorts and this will save you face from a mosfet explosion in case of failture or short, remember to place a fuse also on the battery side to increase the safety (accidental shorts->fire, battery explosion, firemen, police and lawyers around). Input filtering is important, use at least 20000uF 16V in capacitors, a filter inductor would be useful too (heavygauged) but i decided to leave it..

Final considerations

This supply given me up to 85% efficiency (sometimes even 90% at some loads) with an input of 12V because i observed all these tricks to keep it functional and efficient. An o-scope would be useful, to watch the ripple and gate signals (watching for overshoots), but if you follow these guidelines you will avoid these problems.

The cross regulation is good but keep in mind that only the positive output is fully regulated, and the negative only follows it. Place a small load between the negative rail and ground (a 3mm led with a 4.7Kohm resistor) to avoid the negative rail getting lower then -20V. If the load is asymmetric you can have two cases:

-More load on positive rail-> no problems, the negative rail can go lower than -20V, but it is not a real issue for an audio amplifier.
-More load on negative rail-> voltage drop on negative rail (to ground) especially if the load is only on the negative rail.

Fortunately audio amplifiers are quite symmetrical as a load, and the output filter inductor/capacitors helps to maintain the regulation good during asymmetrical transients (Basses)

FOR FIRST TESTING USE A SMALL 12V power supply and use resistors as load monitoring switches heat and current consumption (and output) and try to determine efficiency, if it is higher then 70-75% you are set, it is enough. Adjust the frequency for best compromise between power and switching losses, skin effect and hysteresis losses

Miscellaneous
-------------
1?? FU1 = 10A
1?? L1 = 10u
1?? L2 = FERRITE BEAD
1?? RV1 = 2.2k
1?? RV2 = 24k
1?? T1 = TRAN-3P3S