MARLOW | A marketplace for dissemination of lowpower micro-electronic design

Welcome to MARLOW

A central marketplace for dissemination of lowpower micro-electronics design

Home

Reports

Reports

Projects

lovo

lovo

Summary

This Design Experiment addresses new design methodologies that will contribute to a significant decrease of power dissipation in electronic equipment by decreasing the power consumption and dissipation of the DC/DC converters feeding low power electronics.

New low power systems mainly require low supply voltage. However, the lower the output voltage the lower the efficiency of the DC/DC converter. This is a very important drawback because size of the power converter is highly dependent on the efficiency, and furthermore, the ratio volume/watt in DC/DC converters is higher and higher as the output voltage is reduced. Therefore, it could be the case that future low power integrated circuits could be really small, and on the contrary the converter that feeds it would be a bulky and inefficient one.

The experiment consists of checking the feasibility of new approaches to design and manufacture DC/DC converters generating very low output voltages (< 3.3 V), required for such applications. The main features are:

very low output voltage: 1.5 V

output power: 15 W

very high efficiency (>85%) in an industrial application within the Telecommunication sector;

low volume (size lower than 25x25x10 mm³);

low cost (< 10 ECUs).

Objectives

Development of technical solutions for the power supplies of advanced low power systems, comprising the following topics,

New methods for synchronous rectification for very low output voltage power converters;

Analysis of techniques for high density of integration;

Analysis and validation of new components;

Functional demonstrator close to commercial specifications.

Participants

Alcatel (E), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (E)

Design Story

Public Deliverables