Milovan Kovacevic

Evolution of Very High Frequency Power Supplies

The ongoing demand for smaller and lighter power supplies is driving the motivation to increase the switching frequencies of power converters. Drastic increases however, come along with new challenges, namely the increase of switching losses in all components. The application of power circuits used in radio frequency transmission equipment helps to overcome those. However, those circuits were not designed to meet the same requirements as power converters. This paper summarizes the contributions in the recent years in the application of very high frequency (VHF) technologies in power electronics, which show the results of the recent advances and describes the remaining challenges. The presented results include a self-oscillating gate drive, air-core inductor optimizations, an offline LED driver with a power density of 8.9 W/cm3, and a 120-MHz, 9-W dc powered LED driver with 89% efficiency as well as a bidirectional VHF converter. The challenges to be solved before VHF converters can be used effectively in industrial products are within those three categories: 1) components; 2) circuit architectures; and 3) reliability testing.

A VHF interleaved self-oscillating resonant SEPIC converter with phase-shift burst-mode control

This paper presents design and implementation of the phase-shift burst-mode control method for interleaved self-oscillating resonant SEPIC converters for LED lighting applications. The proposed control method utilizes delays in the turn-on and turn-off of the power stage and control circuitry in order to reduce requirements for the comparator in the regulation circuit. The control method is experimentally evaluated on a 49 MHz dc-dc converter prototype, and the results are presented. The designed converter demonstrates peak efficiency of 81%, maintains efficiency above 75% from 20% load to full load, and is implemented using low-cost switches and integrated circuits.

On the ongoing evolution of very high frequency power supplies

The ongoing demand for smaller and lighter power supplies is driving the motivation to increase the switching frequencies of power converters. Drastic increases however come along with new challenges, namely the increase of switching losses in all components. The application of power circuits used in radio frequency transmission equipment helps to overcome those. However those circuits were not designed to meet the same requirements as power converters. This paper summarizes the contributions in recent years in application of very high frequency (VHF) technologies in power electronics, describes the remaining challenges and shows results of the recent advances, among others a 120MHz, 9 W LED driver with 89 % efficiency.

VHF series-input parallel-output interleaved self-oscillating resonant SEPIC converter

If the switches of two resonant SEPIC converters are capacitively coupled, it is possible to obtain a self-oscillating converter in which the two power stages operate in interleaved mode. This paper describes a topology where the inputs of two SEPIC converters are connected in series, thereby sharing the input voltage. For the same output power and switching frequency, the voltage stress of the switches is reduced by a factor of two while the voltage transformation ratio is doubled. This modification is possible with addition of only two capacitors in the power stage and a biasing circuit. Design considerations and challenges are investigated. To verify the proposed design, a 70 V input, 37 MHz prototype was built using low-cost switching and passive components, and experimental results are presented. Peak observed efficiency was 82%.

Very high frequency interleaved self-oscillating resonant SEPIC converter

This paper describes analysis and design procedure of an interleaved, self-oscillating resonant SEPIC converter, suitable for operation at very high frequencies (VHF) ranging from 30 MHz to 300 MHz. The presented circuit consists of two resonant SEPIC DC-DC converters, and a capacitive interconnection network between the switches which provides self-oscillating and interleaved operation. A design approach to ensure zero voltage switching (ZVS) condition of the MOSFET devices is provided. To verify the proposed method, an 11 W, 50 MHz prototype was built using low-cost VDMOS devices and experimental results are presented. Peak achieved efficiency was 87%.