"Low-Power Power Converter Design Techniques"

- Philip Mok, Professor, Hong Kong Univ. of Sci. & Tech. (HKUST), Hong Kong

Recent advances in process technology allow the rapid development of the highly-integrated system-on-chip (SoC) designs. They also have led to greater demands on power consumption of the systems. Power management has become one of the key components in these SoC designs. Power management ICs with multiple supply voltage levels and tunable supply voltage levels are now mandatory for these SoC designs. The requirements of power efficiency and voltage tracking capability of the power converters embedded in these power management ICs are very critical, in both high-power and low-power operations. This tutorial will discuss the design issues and challenges of these power converters. Several design techniques and strategies to improve the power efficiency of low-power power converter will also be described.