Taking power conversion to the next level
At the recent APEC Conference, pSemi, a subsidiary of Murata, announced what it believes is a breakthrough in multi-level buck regulator technology for mobile battery charging.
The 4-level converter operates over a wide range input from 4.5V to 18V covering USB and wireless charging standards. Current delivery is up to 6A per device, with the option to parallel devices to achieve faster charging times, in all operation modes using a 1 mm height inductor.
This allows the system to achieve equivalent power delivery and faster battery charge times regardless of the type of USB_PD (Power Delivery), PPS, or Qi wireless charging source.
In addition, pSemi has also announced the PE24111, 3.3Vin, two-stage regulator capable of supplying up to 20A, and the PE25213 divide by 2 and 3 capacitor divider.
The PE24111 expands pSemi’s portfolio of two-stage buck regulators that target applications requiring high efficiency in a low-profile form-factor (<1.2mm) applications.
The device consists of a two-phase interleaved charge pump followed by an interleaved buck regulator stage. This power system greatly reduces the dependency on inductance for high efficiency solutions in small-footprint and height-constrained form-factors. The output voltage is selected with external feedback resistors or by an external DAC and can be adjusted between 0.35 and 0.85V.
This makes the PE24111 suitable step-down DC-DC converter solutions for low-profile point-of-load (POL) regulators, high-density, optical transceiver modules, core supplies, ASICs, and FGPAs. To achieve higher power delivery, the PE24111 can be connected in parallel–up to four devices–with synchronization capability.
The PE25213 is a high efficiency charge pump that is configurable to divide down an input voltage by two or three and delivers up to 10A with peak efficiency up to 99 percent. The device uses pSemi’s patented adiabatic or lossless switching architecture to maximize efficiency and reduce solution size.
The PE25213 supports an input voltage range of 5.7V to 15V in divide-by-2 mode and 8.4V to 15V in divide-by-3 mode. It is primarily used as a front-end converter to convert a two- or three-cell battery input to a 1-1.5S output for downstream regulator to improve overall system efficiency and extend run time.
The PE25213 also offers a auto-switch mode to change the divide-down ratio during operation to avoid a downstream under-voltage lockout (UVLO) event at heavy system loading during low battery condition.
The PE25213 comes in a 4.545 mm × 2.715 mm 47-pin WLCSP package. The pinout is specially designed to be fully compatible with Type III PCB design to reduce system cost. It targets 2 and 3S battery input systems such as laptop and 12V input systems such as datacenter and networking applications.
