Energy transmission of switched‐capacitor circuit and application to dc‐dc converter

Abstract

AbstractThe switched capacitor (SC) circuit has been applied to analog signal processing, but few reports have been made on the application to power circuit. Recently, a report has been made on the dc‐dc converter using the SC circuit, but the circuit still has a number of problems, e.g., the loss due to the switching element or equivalent resistance of the SC circuit, the output ripple and the noise.From such a viewpoint, this paper presents first the theoretical and experimental investigations on the energy loss, energy transmission efficiency and output power of the dc‐dc converter using the basic SC circuit. Based on that result, dc‐dc converters are considered using a series‐parallel switching SC circuit with more than one capacitor. It is seen as a result that the loss due to the equivalent resistance is inevitable, even if ideal switching elements or capacitors are used in those SC circuits.As a means to cope with this problem, the dc‐dc converter using a new SC circuit is proposed, where the zero‐voltage switching mechanism is employed using a high‐frequency supply and the peak‐detector circuit. It is shown theoretically that the loss due to the equivalent resistance is not produced in principle in the proposed SC circuit. A result of experiment is shown with a drastic improvement.