UC San Diego

Power conversion circuits are essential components in every electronic device from laptops and cellphones to wearable and implantable devices. These circuits convert the DC voltage of the battery or energy source to the appropriate DC level or AC form required by a load. The key challenge of this class of circuits is that they often define the size and energy of an electronic system. This is since the volume-size and quality-factor of the required inductors render power conversion circuits disproportionately large and lossy to the rest of the electronic system.

This work aims to make power conversion circuits smaller without losing power efficiency by developing new circuit topologies that primarily rely on capacitors instead of inductors. The developed switched capacitor DC-to-DC and DC-to-AC converters rely on architecting the governing current and voltage equations such that they follow efficient mathematical formulae to enable the minimum loss and/or the smallest volume size as compared to prior topologies. The developed topologies thus enable switched capacitor converters to be as efficient as the industry's flagship inductor-based solutions, however in orders-of-magnitude smaller size. Moving forward, such an approach of relying on electric instead of magnetic energy transfer enables the exploitation of fabrication-technology feature-size scaling to shrink the total electronic system size beyond what is feasible through today's technologies.