TY - GEN
T1 - LEGO-PoL
T2 - 35th Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, APEC 2020
AU - Baek, Jaeil
AU - Wang, Ping
AU - Elasser, Youssef
AU - Chen, Yenan
AU - Jiang, Shuai
AU - Chen, Minjie
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 IEEE.
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - This paper presents a family of 48 V-1.5 V merged-two-stage hybrid-switched-capacitor converters with a Linear Extendable Group Operated Point-of-Load (LEGO-PoL) architecture for high current microprocessors. The proposed LEGO-PoL converter leverages the advantages of switched-capacitor (SC) circuits and multiphase buck circuits and can achieve soft charging, current sharing, and automatic voltage balancing. The SC circuits are connected in series to split the high input voltage into multiple stacked voltage domains, and the multiphase buck circuits are connected in parallel to split the high output current into multiple parallel current paths. The inductors of the multiphase buck converters are used as current sources to soft-charge and soft-switch the switched-capacitor circuits, and the switched-capacitor circuits are utilized to ensure current sharing among the multiphase buck circuits. The voltage balancing and current sharing mechanisms of the LEGO-PoL architecture are investigated in detail. A 450 W, 48 V-1.5 V, 300 A LEGO-PoL converter with a peak efficiency of 96%, a full load efficiency of 87.7%, and a power density of 577 W/in3 was built and tested to verify the effectiveness of the LEGO-PoL architecture.
AB - This paper presents a family of 48 V-1.5 V merged-two-stage hybrid-switched-capacitor converters with a Linear Extendable Group Operated Point-of-Load (LEGO-PoL) architecture for high current microprocessors. The proposed LEGO-PoL converter leverages the advantages of switched-capacitor (SC) circuits and multiphase buck circuits and can achieve soft charging, current sharing, and automatic voltage balancing. The SC circuits are connected in series to split the high input voltage into multiple stacked voltage domains, and the multiphase buck circuits are connected in parallel to split the high output current into multiple parallel current paths. The inductors of the multiphase buck converters are used as current sources to soft-charge and soft-switch the switched-capacitor circuits, and the switched-capacitor circuits are utilized to ensure current sharing among the multiphase buck circuits. The voltage balancing and current sharing mechanisms of the LEGO-PoL architecture are investigated in detail. A 450 W, 48 V-1.5 V, 300 A LEGO-PoL converter with a peak efficiency of 96%, a full load efficiency of 87.7%, and a power density of 577 W/in3 was built and tested to verify the effectiveness of the LEGO-PoL architecture.
KW - DC-DC power conversion
KW - hybrid switched-capacitor circuit
KW - linear extendable group operated (LEGO) architecture
KW - point of load (PoL) converter
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85087744656&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85087744656&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/APEC39645.2020.9124564
DO - 10.1109/APEC39645.2020.9124564
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85087744656
T3 - Conference Proceedings - IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition - APEC
SP - 490
EP - 497
BT - APEC 2020 - 35th Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 15 March 2020 through 19 March 2020
ER -