Modular Series Capacitor Buck Topology for Point of Load Applications with Duty Cycle Freer

High step-down ratio converters, such as a 48V-1V point of load converter, present cases with significant switching and conduction losses at the same time. One effective solution to reduce these losses is achieving a modularized design, where each module only shares a small fraction of the input voltage and load current. In this paper, we investigate a modular power conversion architecture based on a series capacitor Buck topology. In addition, we proposed a solution to free duty cycle limitation associated with series capacitor Buck converter to enable fast transient response. An experimental prototype has been built and tested to validate the proposed method.