Steady-State Characteristics of Resonant Switched Capacitor Converters

Conventional switched capacitor converters have an inherent drawback that their efficiency decreases as the output current increases. This inherent drawback is due to a periodical forced charging and discharging operation in the internal switched capacitors accompanied by a large capacitor current. Their efficiency can not be increased by decreasing its internal resistance. As a result, conventional switched capacitor converters have been limited to uses with a very small output current. To solve this problem we presented a novel switched capacitor converter topology that uses a resonant operation instead of the forced charging and discharging operation. Its advantage over a conventional switched capacitor converter is higher efficiency even in a high output current region. In this paper, the operation analysis and steady-state characteristics are described in detail for a half buck type switched capacitor converter, and they are confirmed by experimentation.