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AbstractSwitched-capacitor (SC) converters are gaining pop- second-stage buck converter is cascaded to the output of the
ularity due to their high power density and suitability for on-chip SC converter to act as a controlled current load. As a result,
integration. Soft-charging techniques can be used to eliminate the SC stage is allowed to operate with a larger capacitor
the current transient during the phase switching instances, and
improve the power density and efciency of SC converters. In this voltage ripple without adversely affecting the efciency, which
paper, we propose a split-phase control scheme that enables the improves the energy utilization of the capacitors. The second-
Dickson converter to achieve complete soft-charging operation, stage buck converter operates with a low voltage stress, en-
which is not possible using the conventional two-phase control. abling an increase in the switching frequency, thereby reducing
An analytical method is extended to understand and design split- the magnetic component size. The soft-charging technique can
phase controlled Dickson converters. The proposed technique and
analysis are veried by both simulation and experimental results. result in signicant power density and efciency improvements
An 8-to-1 step-down Dickson converter is built to demonstrate [12][14]. A formal method was presented in [15] to aid in
the reduction in output impedance and improvement in efciency the design of such soft-charging SC converters.
as a result of the split-phase controlled soft-charging operation. Among the various SC converter topologies, the Dickson
converter [3], [16], [17] has efcient utilization of switches
but poor utilization of capacitors [18], and thus would benet
I. I NTRODUCTION
signicantly from soft-charging operation. However, it has
Current (A)
S4 S1
Co 0
Vsc
S8 S7 S6 S5 Hardcharging
+ 25
Iload
Vin 0 5 10 15 20
S3 S2
C2 25
Current (A)
Fig. 1: 4-to-1 Dickson topology. 0
Twophase softcharging
25
C2 0 5 10 15 20
C3
+ 5
C1
Vin C3
Current (A)
C2 Iload C1 Iload
0
(a) Phase 1. (b) Phase 2.
Splitphase softcharging
Fig. 2: Two-phase operation of a 4-to-1 Dickson converter. 5
0 5 10 15 20
Time (s)
(SSL) of SC converters [1]. The current through one of the Fig. 3: Current waveform of capacitor C2 of the Dickson SC
capacitors (C2 ) is shown in Fig. 3. It can be seen that there is a converter. Simulation parameters: C1 = C2 = C3 = 10 F,
large impulse current at phase transitions in the conventional, fsw =100 kHz, Iload = 2 A.
hard-charging case (top plot). To minimize this impulse, large
capacitors or high switching frequency have to be employed
such that the converter operates in the fast switching limit where Vc is the smallest of the capacitor voltages. It can be
(FSL) [1]. In soft-charging operation, the output capacitance seen that (3) satises both (1) and (2). At the end of Phase
is removed and a constant current load is used so that the 1, assuming equal capacitor values, the capacitor voltages
output voltage can change instantaneously to compensate for become
the difference in capacitor voltages. By eliminating the voltage VC 3 3Vc + Vc
VC = 2Vc Vc , (4)
mismatch and the resultant current impulse, the soft-charging 2
C3 C2 Switches S8 S7 S6 S5 S4 S3 S2 S1
+
C1 Two-phase q1 q2 q1 q2 q1 q2 q1 q2
Vin Iload C3 Iload Split-phase q3 q2 q1 q4 q1 q2 q1 q2
C2 C1
Current (A)
voltage vector becomes vi + vi , giving
0
Ai (vi + vi ) = 0, (8)
Splitphase sequence 1
where v represents the change in voltage due to charge 5
0 5 10 15 20
being delivered to the load. From (7) and (8), we have
5
Ai vi = 0. (9)
Current (A)
Similarly, a charge ow vector is dened as the vector of 0
charge that ows into the positive terminal of each element in
the circuit and is given in the form of Splitphase sequence 2
T 5
q = qin qc T qout . (10) 0 5 10 15 20
5
It should be noted that in some work, the charge vector is
Current (A)
normalized with respect the total charge delivered to the output
[1], but the unnormalized convention is used in this paper. In 0
each phase, KCL equations can be expressed by
Splitphase sequence 3
Bi qi = 0, (11) 5
0 5 10 15 20
where Bi represents the reduced incidence matrix [21]. More- Time (s)
over, for a capacitor, the change in voltage and the charge ow Fig. 6: Current waveform of capacitor C2 of the Dickson SC
is related by converter. Simulation parameters are as in Fig. 3.
q = Cvc , (12)
In addition, for periodic steady-state operation, there is also a
condition that the net charge that ows into a capacitor in a the proposed split-phase control, there are six total possible
period is zero: sequences and 3 representative phases are shown below. While
Vin 40 V
Iload 2A
Rds,on 10 m
RESR 1 m
C1 , C2 , C3 10 F
Co,hardcharging 100 F
Co,sof tcharging None
0
10
Two phase, hardcharging Fig. 8: Hardware prototype of the proposed converter.
Two phase, softcharging
Split phase, softcharging
Output impedance ()
1
10
Vin 200 V DC
Iload 3A
Vout 25 V DC
fsw 50-500 kHz
2
10
4 5 6 7
10 10 10 10
Frequency (Hz)
uses 12 GaN switches and 7 ying capacitors. A photo of the
prototype is shown in Fig. 8 while the design specication
Fig. 7: Simulated output impedance of the Dickson converter. and component listing are provided in Table IV and Table V
respectively. The same converter is used for hard-charging as
well as soft-charging operation. The difference is that in soft-
loss of the converter and is widely used to characterize charging operation, there is an extra inductor added to act as
the performance of such converters [22][24]. The output a current load. Since the same capacitor values are used for
impedance for the Dickson converter is plotted in Fig. 7. both hard-charging and soft-charging operation, the prototype
It can be seen that the conventional hard-charging Dickson focuses on the improvement in efciency at low switching
converter shows two regions of asymptotic behaviors as found frequencies. It is also possible to optimize the hardware design
in previous literature [1]. At low frequencies (SSL), when for power density improvement, or both. Even though the
the power loss due to the current transient dominates, the additional inductor incurs an approximately 20% increase in
impedance decreases as switching frequency increases. The the components volume of the power stage, the total enclosed
impedance reaches a constant at high frequencies (FSL), when box volume of the power stage increases to a lesser extent.
the conduction loss dominates. As can be seen in Fig. 7, The voltage Vsc (as seen in Fig. 1) as well as the switching
with two-phase soft-charging operation, the impedance in the functions are shown in Fig. 9. The switching signals are
SSL region is reduced signicantly. This means that the soft- slightly different from what is used in simulation (Fig. 5). This
charging converter is able to use smaller ying capacitance is because using the original sequence (1b 1a 2b 2a)
while having the same output impedance at the same switching results in negative Vds voltages across some of the switches,
frequency. However, there is still non-negligible frequency and bidirectional blocking switches would have to be used.
dependent behavior since complete soft-charing operation can- Since it has been shown by the analysis in Section III, that
not be achieved on a conventional Dickson converter. With the switching sequence does not matter, the actual sequence
the proposed split-phase control however, it can be seen that used in practice is sequence 2 in Section III (i.e. 2a 2b
now the output impedance is independent of the switching
frequency, due to the complete elimination of the charge
TABLE V: Component listing of the proposed converter.
transfer losses. It should be noted that the impedance at high
frequencies is slightly higher than the FSL impedance of the Component Part number Parameters
conventional two-phase operation. This is due to the fact that S12 , S5 - S1 EPC2014 40 V, 16 m, 10 A
in the added phases (Phase 1b and Phase 2b), there is one path S11 - S6 EPC2007 100 V, 30 m, 6 A
fewer that delivers current to the load, and hence a slightly C4 - C 7 C1812X224K2RACTU 250 V,2.2 F
increased effective switch resistance. However, this increase C2 , C3 C3216X7S2A225K160AB 100 V, 2.2 F
in conduction loss will be less noticeable as the converter C1 C3225X7R1H225K250AB 50 V, 2.2 F
Co C3216X5R1V226M160AC 35 V, 22 F
conversion ratio increases.
Inductor XAL5050-562 5.6 H
A hardware prototype has been implemented for the pro-
posed split-phase controlled soft-charging Dickson SC con- Level-shifting ADUM5210
Micro-controller STM32f051
verter, with a voltage step-down ratio of 8 to 1. The prototype
Paper O8-1 Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) 5
0
10
Hardcharging
Output impedance ()
Softcharging twophase
Softcharging splitphase
1
10
4 5 6
10 10 10
Frequency (Hz)
Efficiency (%)
Vds voltage and the converter operates without issues using
the GaN FETs. 90
The output impedance is plotted against the switching
frequency in Fig. 10, and is calculated from the measured
85 Hardcharging
data using
Softcharging, twophase
Vin
Vout
Rout = N , Softcharging, splitphase
Iout 80
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
where N = 8 is the conversion ratio. It can be seen that Load current (A)
similar to the simulation results, the output impedance in hard- Fig. 11: Measured efciency of the Dickson converter in deep
charging operation increases as frequency decreases. Two- SSL region. Vin = 40 V, fsw = 100 kHz.
phase soft-charging operation reduces the impedance at low
switching frequencies while the proposed split-phase operation
results in the lowest output impedance. For example, to achieve achieve superior efciency and/or power density compared to
the same output impedance as the split-phase operation at 100 conventional SC converters. The existing analysis is extended
kHz, the hard-charging converter has to switch at over 500 to account for the split-phase and the desired duty ratio for
kHz. This means that the split-phase converter can reduce the each phase is found. Besides supporting simulation results,
capacitor values by a factor of 5 if switching at 500 kHz. the proposed technique was experimentally veried with an
Consequently, the reduced capacitor requirement more than 8-to-1 Dickson converter. The hardware prototype in soft-
compensates for the additional volume of the added inductor. charging operation has been shown to exhibit signicantly
In addition, the efciencies of the converter in the SSL lower output impedance and higher efciency in SSL region
region are plotted in Fig. 11. It can be seen that soft-charging than conventional SC converters.
operation brings signicant efciency improvement while the
proposed split-phase control has the highest efciency. The
split-phase soft-charging operation also has the smallest drop A PPENDIX
in efciency as the load increases, due to its smallest output For the 4-to-1 Dickson converter in Fig. 4, The reduced
impedance. The hardware results also conrm that indeed the loop matrices are
split-phase control is effective for a Dickson converter with
1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1
high conversion ratios. It should be noted that both the output A1a = A =
0 0 1 1 1 2a 0 0 0 1 1
impedance measurements and the efciency measurements are
A1b = 0 0 1 1 1 A2b = 0 1 1 0 1
obtained using reduced input voltage and output current than
(16)
the rated values. This is to prevent the converter from breaking
because of the heat produced by the inefcient hard-charging and the reduced incidence matrices are
operation in the SSL region. 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0
B1a = 1 0 1 0 1 B2a = 0 1 0 1 1
1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
V. C ONCLUSIONS
0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 0
In this paper, we proposed a split-phase control method 0 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1
B1b B2b = =
that enables the Dickson SC converter to operate in soft- 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0
charging mode. With complete soft-charging operation, the 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0
proposed converter has no current transient and thus can (17)
Paper O8-1 Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) 6
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Paper O8-1 Workshop on Control and Modeling for Power Electronics (COMPEL) 7