Sampled-Data Modeling of Switched- Capacitor Voltage Regulator With Frequency-Modulation Control

The development of systems-on-chip requires embedded power management solutions due to the large number of power domains. The switched-capacitor voltage regulator is a suitable candidate as capacitors may be integrated whereas inductors still suffer limitations in that respect. Literature covers proposals of optimized power stages and several dedicated controllers for switched-capacitor DC-DC converters. Unfortunately the results do not cover systematic stability analyses. The paper proposes an original and systematic approach for the stability analysis of a switched-capacitor voltage regulator using sampled-data modeling. An application is given for a one-phase converter with a frequency-modulation based controller. The stability of the open-loop and closed-loop model is proposed and can be extended to multi-phase configurations.