A Family of Exponential Step-Down Switched-Capacitor Converters and Their Applications in Two-Stage Converters

This paper presents a family of exponential voltage step-down switched-capacitor (ESC) converters. Considering the demand of large-voltage-gain step-down converters in the market, it is difficult to achieve the step-down requirement with good efficiency for a single-stage buck converter. The two-stage converter has been an effective solution for high-voltage-step-down applications. In this paper, making use of the large-voltage-gain conversion property of the ESC converter, a two-stage ESC-buck converter is proposed. A mathematical tool for the accurate calculation of efficiency is developed. The efficiency characteristic of the proposed ESC converter is established. Experimental efficiency measurements are carried out using the ESC converter proposed and two different types of commercially available buck converter ICs. The results show that the efficiency of the ESC-buck converter is higher than that of a single buck converter for large-voltage-gain applications.