Hi Dominik,
I had an explore right now. 525R to match 3.34V of BJT version. First tried 10R, 100R, 470R, 1k with the same 3.3K Rsource and 3.3k Rload as in previous simulations. What I'm now seeing more clearly is that:
- From 0ºC to 60ºC, shift is negligible, some 2mV if uncompensated, but falls after 60ºC some 11mV to 15mV (datasheet shows 15mV to 20mV droop, depending on initial Vref of 2.495V and 2.440V (2.550V drifts upwards 15 -20 mV, from memory).
- The BJT version allegedly centres the parabola around 50ºC. With no compensation or the resistor compensation version, the parabola is centred around 30ºC.
- The larger the resistor on the anode of the TL431, the smaller the dV versus dT, but the improvement is small compared to the BJT version (in the simulation, at least).
I would have thought that the more current there is out of the TL431, the greater the voltage on the anode resistor, so it would push Vref upwards by the same amount, and the higher Vref seems to the FB pin, the lower it would pull Vref to bring it back to what FB is expecting. You would think that as Vref droops with rising temperature, it would be of interest to subtract equivalent mV from FB pin to create a linear response across temperature, rather than parabolic. I couldn't get anything like that to work in previous attempts, if it can work at all as the simulation shows iFB is always 2.08uA down to 2.07uA...
So, if the BJT version produced comparable results in the real world, it would only be of use if Tamb is really expected to range from 0ºC to 100ºC. So it's more about knowing the temperature range of operation, and if that will be 0ºC to 60ºC it's of no benefit adding the 'Christmas Tree decorations', especially if the large tsunami at start-up is going to be problematic downstream.
It has been an interesting experiment to compare both methods and thank you very much for your suggestion. Below are simulation results.
10R:
100R:
470R:
1k:
525R: