(Invited) Passive Component Technologies for Advanced Power Conversion Enabled by Wide-Band-Gap Power Devices

Abstract

Modern power electronics typically operate with switching frequencies in the tens of kilohertz to a few megahertz. SiC and GaN power switches promise to enable increasing these frequencies by an order of magnitude or more. Doing so would allow reducing the energy storage requirements for passive components, particularly transformers and inductors, which typically take up the largest portion of the volume of a power converter, and which are also responsible for much of the power loss, cost, and design difficulty in the converter. In principle, a smaller energy storage requirement should make these components smaller and lower in loss and cost. However, material, fabrication, and design constraints make it hard to achieve such improvements. These issues are reviewed and new results on design optimization of low profile air-core inductors and loss characterization of high-performance magnetic materials for 10 to 100 MHz are presented.