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A soft-switching bidirectional dc-dc converter using a lossless active snubber is proposed in this paper. In the proposed converter, zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) of main switches is achieved by utilizing an active snubber which consists of auxiliary switches, diodes, an inductor, and a capacitor. Although conduction losses associated with additional components increase, switching losses are significantly reduced due to the ZVS operation of main switches. Therefore, total efficiency is improved. Moreover, there is no reverse-recovery problem of the intrinsic body diodes of the switches. To verify the ZVS of the main switches and efficiency improvement of the proposed bidirectional dc-dc converter, theoretical analysis and experimental results from a 200 W prototype are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a systematic sizing methodology for switched-capacitor DC/DC converters aimed at maximizing the converter efficiency under the die area constraint. To do so, we propose first an analytical solution of the optimum switching frequency to maximize the converter efficiency. When the parasitic capacitances are low, this solution leads to an identical contribution of the switches and transfer capacitors to the converter output impedance. As the parasitic capacitances increase, the optimum switching frequency decreases. Secondly, optimum capacitor and switch sizes for maximum efficiency are provided. We show that the overdrive voltage strongly impacts the optimum switch width through the modification of their conductance. To support the sizing methodology, a model of the efficiency of switched-capacitor DC/DC converters is developed. It is validated against simulation and measurement results in 65 nm and 0.13 \mu\ m CMOS, respectively. The proposed sizing methodology shows how the converter efficiency can be traded-off for die area reduction and what is the impact of parasitic capacitances on the converter sizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A triple-mode step-up/step-down switched-capacitor DC-DC converter is proposed, and it can work with a wide input voltage range. There are three operational modes in the proposed converter: triple-step-up, double-step-up, and step-down modes. A built-in clock generator was designed to generate a constant switching frequency, independent of the input voltage. The proposed circuit was implemented by a 0.35-\mum CMOS mixed-signal 2P4M 3.3/5 V polycide process with a die area of 1.56\times 1.47\ mm^2. The output voltage is fixed at 3.3 V, while the input voltage range is 1.8–5 V. The maximal load current for a 1.8-V input voltage is 10 mA, while it increases to 30 mA when the input voltage is larger than 3 V. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A two-stage hybrid power management unit (PMU) is presented with a highly-efficient novel ON-OFF LDO as the second stage and uses a switched-capacitor dc-dc divider as the first stage. The design targets IoT applications that operate across a wide range of load from sub-microwatt to 100’s of microwatts. The first stage provides a step-down using selectable sizing of its switches to improve efficiency to >95% across the target range of load current. The output voltage that is divided from the first stage is then regulated using the proposed ON-OFF LDO with a dropout voltage of < 30mV. The hybrid architecture regulates a 1.3V input to 0.4V and achieves a power efficiency of >80% for load ranges 1μ - 240μA. The design is fabricated in 28-nm CMOS technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]