A high efficiency integrable power converter with soft switching slew-rate control

Slew-rate control (SRC) in integrated switching power stages for noise sensitive systems is presently carried out at switching loss expense by linearly driving the power devices in the active region during the rising and falling output voltage edges. In this work, the zero voltage transition soft switching technique is considered as a means of performing the same SRC function. A bridge-type power scheme is proposed and three structures for the auxiliary branches are evaluated in a breadboard prototype. Experimental results demonstrate that better efficiency than the conventional SRC technique can be attained by splitting the auxiliary branch structure. Finally, preliminary aspects of converter integration are presented.