A self-driven soft-switching voltage regulator for future microprocessors

In conventional high frequency 12-V input voltage regulators (VR), large gate driver loss and body diode conduction loss raise crucial challenges to its gate driver implementation. The proposed self-driven topologies are basically buck-derived multiphase interleaving soft switching topologies, which eliminate the synchronous rectifier MOSFET drivers and save driving loss and body diode loss, so that it is a high efficiency, high power density solution for future microprocessors. A 1U four-phase 1.3-V/100-A VRM running at 1MHz demonstrates its advantages (cost, size and efficiency) over the conventional multiphase buck converter.