3V supply delivers 12V p-p to piezo speaker

Low-profile piezoelectric speakers can provide quality sound for portable electronic devices, but they require voltage swings greater than 8V p-p across the speaker element. Yet, most portable devices include only a low-voltage power source, and conventional amplifiers operating from batteries cannot provide enough voltage swing to drive a piezoelectric speaker. One approach to this problem is to use IC₁ in Figure 1, which you can configure to drive a piezoelectric speaker with as much as 12V p-p and operate from a single 3V supply. IC₁, a MAX4410, combines a stereo-headphone driver with an inverting charge pump that derives a negative –3V supply from the positive 3V supply. Thus, providing the drive amplifiers with an internal ±3V supply allows each output of IC₁ to swing 6V p-p. Configuring IC₁ as a BTL (bridge-tied load) driver again doubles the maximum swing at the load to 12V p-p. In the BTL configuration, IC₁'s right channel serves as the master amplifier. It sets the gain of the device, drives one side of the speaker, and provides a signal to the left channel. If you configure IC₁ as a unity-gain follower, the left channel inverts the output of the right channel and drives the other leg of the speaker. To ensure low distortion and good matching, you should set the left-channel gain using precision resistors.

We tested the circuit with a Panasonic (www.panasonic.com) WM-R57A piezoelectric speaker, yielding the THD+N (total-harmonic-distortion-plus noise) curves (Figure 2 and Figure 3). Note that THD+N increases as frequency increases in both graphs. Because the speaker appears to the amplifier as a capacitor, the speaker's impedance decreases as frequency increases, resulting in a larger current draw from the amplifier. IC₁ remains stable with the speaker, but a speaker with different characteristics might cause instability (Figure 4). In that case, you can isolate the speaker's capacitance from the amplifier by adding a simple inductor/resistor network in series with the speaker (within the dotted lines on Figure 1). The network maintains stability by maintaining a minimum high-frequency load of approximately 10Ω at the IC's output.