Circuits Syst Signal Process (2014) 33:2643–2653
DOI 10.1007/s00034-014-9753-1
SHORT PAPER
Design and Analysis of Output Voltage Regulation
in Multi-Phase Switched Capacitor Converters
Alexander Kushnerov · Shmuel Ben-Yaakov
Received: 17 July 2013 / Revised: 31 January 2014 / Accepted: 4 February 2014 /
Published online: 21 March 2014
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract A new regulation method based on duty cycle control of the average cur-
rents in the multi-phase switched capacitor converters (SCC) is proposed, analyzed,
and verified experimentally for the no effective charging case, also known as the fast
switching limit. The regulation is accomplished by adjusting the value of the SCC
equivalent resistance. To this end, the time slots allotted to each of the SCC topolo-
gies are adjusted, while the total switching period is kept constant. The time slots
are represented by master and slave duty cycles. By this, the SCC output voltage is
expressed analytically as a function of the master duty cycle. In a similar way, ana-
lytical expressions for the voltages across the flying capacitors and for the average
currents in each of the topologies can be obtained. Excellent agreement was found
between the theoretical and experimental results.
Keywords Duty cycle control · Efficiency · Sensitivity · Switched capacitor
converter
1 Introduction
Switched capacitor converters (denoted hereinafter as SCC for singular and plural)
have inherent losses that make their use prohibitive in many applications. Still, SCC
are preferred in some cases due to their IC compatibility, relatively small size, and the
lack of magnetic elements. It is well known that the SCC exhibit high efficiency only
A. Kushnerov (B ) · S. Ben-Yaakov
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev,
P.O. Box 653, 84105 Beer-Sheva, Israel
e-mail: kushnero@ee.bgu.ac.il
S. Ben-Yaakov
e-mail: sby@ee.bgu.ac.il