Hybrid Switched-Capacitor Circuits and Magnetics for High-Performance Power Conversion

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Power electronics is a core technology for future energy systems including data

centers, telecommunication, and distributed energy resources. These are important and

high-impact applications demanding high performance and advanced functions. To

leverage the advances in semiconductor devices and the scaling laws of passive

components, a promising trend is to minimize the power conversion stress and maximize

the passive component utilization through hybrid switched-capacitor power conversion and

magnetics integration. In pursuit of this vision, this talk first presents the recent

developments in hybrid switched-capacitor power architectures for high current CPU

voltage regulators. Various design considerations for the hybrid converter will be discussed,

including the architecture benefits, magnetics coupling, control techniques, 3D packaging,

and the dynamics of the switching cells. A few recent 48V-1V CPU voltage regulator

examples will be compared to showcase the benefits. We will then introduce a large-scale

open-source power magnetics research platform – MagNet (mag-net.princeton.edu) – to

transform the modeling and design of power magnetics with data-driven methods, such as

machine learning. MagNet enables the development of a unified modeling framework for

modeling power magnetics with arbitrary excitation waveforms, temperature variation, and

dc-bias and provides a transparent platform for academia and industry to share research

data and compare results. Finally, we will discuss the synergy between flying capacitor

multilevel converter (FCML) and coupled magnetics to unlock the potential of hybrid

switched-capacitor circuits and magnetics co-design.

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SWISS_PELS_Lecture_Minjie_Chen_03062022

373.21 KiB

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