High-density Power Management Architecture for Portable Applications

This thesis introduces a power management architecture (PMA) and its on-chip implementation, designed for battery-powered portable applications. Compared to conventional two-stage PMA architectures, consisting of a front-end inductive converter followed by a set of point-of-load (PoL) buck converters, the presented PMA has improved power density. The new architecture, named MSC-DB, is based on a hybrid converter topology that combines a fixed ratio multi-output switched capacitor converter (MSC) and a set of differential-input buck (DB) converters, to achieve low volume and high power processing efficiency. The front-end switched capacitor stage has a higher power density than the conventionally used inductive converters. The downstream differential-input buck converters enable tight output voltage regulation, and allow for a drastic reduction of output filter inductors without the need for increasing switching frequency, hence limiting switching losses and improving the efficiency of the system. Furthermore, the new PMA provides battery cells balancing feature, not existing in conventional systems. The PMA architecture is implemented both as a discrete prototype and as an application-specific integrated circuit (IC) module. The on-chip implemented architecture is fabricated in a standard 0.13µm CMOS process and operates at 9.3 MHz switching frequency. Experimental comparisons with a conventional two-cell battery input architecture, providing 15 W of total power in three different voltage outputs, demonstrate up to a 50% reduction in the inductances of the downstream converter stages and up to a 53% reduction in losses, equivalent to the improvement of the power processing efficiency of a 12%. Moreover, the fabricated IC module is co-packaged with low-profile thin-film inductors, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced architecture in reducing the volume of PMAs for portable applications and possibly providing complete on-chip implementation of PMAs in near future.Ph.D