Why Coupled Inductors Enhance High-Current Power Delivery: Modeling and Intuition

Описание: One of the best circuit designs for high-performance power delivery is a multi-phase buck converter with coupled inductors. The coupling fundamentally alters the trade-offs between ripple current, loss, energy storage, and transient response, enabling improvements in one or more of these aspects without compromises in the others. This webinar de-mystifies this technology, starting with a simple, intuitive model and showing how a more complete model can be developed building on the simple model. Despite the popularity of coupled inductors and their well-known advantages, a simple performance optimization, based on the wrong assumptions, indicates that they have little benefit. We look carefully at how to structure a simple optimization to get the full benefit and unlock the potential for high efficiency with small, low-cost components and extremely fast transient capability.

More on the Power Management Integration Center: https://dartgo.org/pmic

Reference 1: Discussion of the modeling approach and discrete and on-die implementations. https://dartgo.org/CoupL-CICC-2021

(C. R. Sullivan and M. Chen, “Coupled Inductors for Fast-Response High-Density Power Delivery: Discrete and Integrated,” IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), 2021, doi: 10.1109/CICC51472.2021.9431437.)

Reference 2: More complete details on modeling methods. https://dartgo.org/CoupL-TPEL-2021

(M. Chen and C. R. Sullivan, “Unified Models for Coupled Inductors Applied to Multiphase PWM Converters,” IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 36(12), Dec. 2021, doi: 10.1109/TPEL.2021.3088083)