Interleaved buck converters with a single-capacitor turn-off snubber

This paper proposes interleaved buck converters with a single-capacitor snubber to smooth out switch turn-off transition. The single-capacitor snubber is used to limit rising rate of drain-source voltage of the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) switch in the converters to reduce turn-off loss. In addition, the converters are operated at the boundary of continuous and discontinuous conduction modes (CCM), (DCM) to reduce turn-on loss, and in an interleaving fashion to reduce output current ripple. As compared with the counterparts of conventional converter topologies, the proposed converters have the merits of less component count, higher efficiency over a certain load range, smaller size, and they are easier to implement. Hardware measurements obtained from experimental prototypes have verified these merits.

[1]  Fred C. Lee,et al.  Zero-voltage-switching multi-resonant technique-a novel approach to improve performance of high frequency quasi-resonant converters , 1988, PESC '88 Record., 19th Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[2]  F. Lee,et al.  Zero-voltage switching technique in DC/DC converters , 1986 .

[3]  I. Barbi,et al.  A family of ZVS-PWM active-clamping DC-to-DC converters: synthesis, analysis, design, and experimentation , 1997 .

[4]  Peng Xu,et al.  Investigating coupling inductors in the interleaving QSW VRM , 2000, APEC 2000. Fifteenth Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (Cat. No.00CH37058).

[5]  Ching-Jung Tseng,et al.  Passive lossless snubbers for DC/DC converters , 1998, APEC '98 Thirteenth Annual Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition.

[6]  K. M. Smith,et al.  Properties and synthesis of passive lossless soft-switching PWM converters , 1999 .

[7]  D. Maksimović,et al.  A general approach to synthesis and analysis of quasi-resonant converters , 1989, 20th Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[8]  K. M. Smith,et al.  Lossless, passive soft switching methods for inverters and amplifiers , 1997 .

[9]  F. C. Lee,et al.  Variations of quasi-resonant DC-DC converter topologies , 1986, 1986 17th Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[10]  Chin Chang Current ripple bounds of interleaved power converters , 1996 .

[11]  C. Munoz B.,et al.  Study of a new passive lossless turn-off snubber , 1998, 6th IEEE Power Electronics Congress. Technical Proceedings. CIEP 98 (Cat. No.98TH8375).

[12]  Chern-Lin Chen,et al.  Passive lossless snubbers for DC/DC converters , 1998 .

[13]  Fred C. Lee,et al.  Resonant switches - Topologies and characteristics , 1985, 1985 IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[14]  Peng Xu,et al.  Performance improvements of interleaving VRMs with coupling inductors , 2001 .

[15]  Fred C. Lee,et al.  Characterization of an active clamp flyback topology for power factor correction applications , 1996 .