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This paper presents a wide-Vin step-down parallel-resonant converter (PRC), comprising an integrated 5-bit capacitor array and a 300-nH resonant coil, placed in parallel to a conventional buck converter. Soft-switching resonant converters are beneficial for high-Vin multi-MHz converters to reduce dominant switching losses, enabling higher switching frequencies. The output filter inductor is optimized based on an empirical study of available inductors. The study shows that faster switching significantly reduces not only the inductor value but also volume, price, and even the inductor losses. In addition, unlike conventional resonant concepts, soft-switching control as part of the proposed PRC eliminates input voltage-dependent losses over a wide operating range, resulting in 76.3% peak efficiency. At Vin = 48 V, a loss reduction of 35% is achieved compared with the conventional buck converter. Adjusting an integrated capacitor array, and selecting the number of oscillation periods, keeps the switching frequency within a narrow range. This ensures high efficiency across a wide range of Vin = 12–48 V, 100–500-mA load, and 5-V output at up to 25-MHz switching frequency. Thanks to the low output current ripple, the output capacitor can be as small
as 50 nF.
A highly integrated synchronous buck converter with a predictive dead time control for input voltages >18 V with 10 MHz switching frequency is presented. A high resolution dead time of ˜125 ps allows to reduce dead time dependent losses without requiring body diode conduction to evaluate the dead time. High resolution is achieved by frequency compensated sampling of the switching node and by an 8 bit differential delay chain. Dead time parameters are derived in a comprehensive study of dead time depended losses. This way, the efficiency of fast switching DC-DC converters can be optimized by eliminating the body diode forward conduction losses, minimizing reverse recovery losses and by achieving zero voltage switching. High-speed circuit blocks for fast switching operation are presented including level shifter, gate driver, PWM generator. The converter has been implemented in a 180 nm high-voltage BiCMOS technology.
Switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) convert an input DC-voltage into a higher or lower output voltage. In automotive, analog control is mostly used in order to keep the required output voltages constant and resistant to disturbances. The design of robust analog control for SMPS faces parameter variations of integrated and external passive components. Using digital control, parameter variations can be eliminated and the required area for the integrated circuit can be reduced at the same time.
Digital control design bears challenges like the prevention of limit cycle oscillations and controller wind-up. This paper reviews how to prevent these effects. Digital control loops introduce new sources for dead times in the control loop, for example the latency of the analog-to-digitalconverter (ADC). Dead times have negative influence on the stability of the control loop, because they lead to phase delays. Consequently, low latency is one of the key requirements for analog-to-digital converters in digitally controlled SMPS.
Exploiting the example of a 500 kHz-buck converter with a crossover frequency of 70 kHz, this paper shows that the 5 μs-latency of a 16-analog-to-digital-converter leads to a reduction in phase margin of 126°. The latency is less critical for boost converters because of their inherent lower crossover frequencies.
Finally, the paper shows a comparison between analog and digital control of SMPS with regard to chip area and test costs.