Design of a Novel Cascaded Point-of-Load Power Converter with Reduced Sensitivity to Component Parameter Variations
Abstract
High-efficiency and high-power-density point-of-load (POL) converters are critical for data center power supplies. Although hybrid resonant switched-capacitor (ReSC) converters can substantially reduce the volume of passive components, they often suffer from severe efficiency degradation when the switching frequency mismatches the resonant frequency due to component tolerances. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a parameter-mismatch insensitive cascaded POL converter by integrating a BUCK stage with a cascaded voltage divider (CVD). By introducing an auxiliary resonant branch, a multi-resonant operation is established, enabling the residual inductor energy caused by component variations to be transferred to the output during the dead time with virtually eliminated hard-switching losses. Consequently, precise matching between the switching frequency and the resonant frequency is no longer mandatory. A 12 V-to-1 V/30 A GaN-based prototype was developed to validate the theoretical analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed converter maintains high efficiency under a ±10% component variation and achieves robust voltage regulation and fast transient response, making it highly suitable for high-current data center applications.