Synthesizing Step-Down Switched Capacitor Power Converter Topologies

The fast-growing development in wearable electronic devices leads to high demand for small-volume, lightweight, and high-efficiency DC-DC power converters, particularly switched capacitor (SC) DC-DC converters. In this paper, we propose a synthesis framework of step-down SC DC-DC power converters to obtain an optimum converter topology under the design constraints of the conversion ratio and a minimum number of capacitors. The proposed rule-based clustering reduction techniques have reduced the search space and sped up the conversion ratio analysis. In the case study of 8:1 converter synthesis, the run-time for conversion ratio analysis is reduced by 1.26, ×, 10⁶. The proposed efficiency optimization method has improved the peak efficiencies of the cascaded 2:1 converter and Fibonacci converter by 4.7% and 12.8%. The proposed framework has identified new topologies and variants of conventional topologies. The variant of cascaded 2:1 converter shows an improvement of 8.2% on peak efficiency.