Power Conversion Techniques in CMOS Technology

No morden electronic systems could work without power conversion technology. For instance, a laptop, a mobile phone, or an electric car has only one battery, which offers only one supply voltage. However, there are thousands of sub-circuits in these devices, analog and digital, high voltage and low voltage, CMOS and bipolar, and they require various supply voltages to operate properly. How to generate different supplies efficiently and accurately for these sub-circuits is a crucial and challenging task. This course will cover the most common DC-DC power conversion techniques, starting from the simplest resistor diver, to more sophisticated voltage regulator such as LDOs, switched-capacitor DC-DC converter and inductive DC-DC converter (buck converter).

In addition, basics of class D power amplifiers will be introduced in this course, which shares similar principle as a buck converter. A class D power amplifier converts power from a DC supply to a high energy (>1W) AC audio signal, which can be found in a lot of headphones and high-end sound systems.