Integrated Three-Level Flying Capacitor DC-DC Buck Converter for CubeSat Applications

MARÍN, JORGE; GAK, JOEL; CALARCO, NICOLAS; OLIVA, ALEJANDRO; LINDSTROM, ESTEBAN OSCAR; MIGUEZ, MATIAS; FALCÓN, ALFREDO; OSTERMAN, NIRIA; ROJAS, CHRISTIAN

Córdoba

Congreso; CAE 2023 Argentine Conference on Electronics; 2023

UTN FRC

In this work, the design, simulation and implementation of a DC-DC buck converter based on the Three-level FlyingCapacitor Converter architecture for space applications, namelyCubeSat systems, using the Skywater 130nm CMOS technologyis presented. The power circuits are fully integrated on-chip,including the power MOSFETs and the gate drivers, to obtainan efficient and compact implementation. This versatile powerelectronics building block, is also a contribution to the opensource IC design community. Additionally, tests structures for theflying capacitor and the output filter inductors are included tocharacterize the technology passive. The active area of the dualcore circuit (including power switches and drivers) occupies lessthan 1mm2 of silicon in this process. Simulated results shows apeak efficiency of 87% at 140mA load current for the single coreconverter, and a peak efficiency of 93.3% at 555mA load currentfor the dual-core converter, at 1MHz switching frequency. It alsoshows a 85% peak efficiency for full on-chip flying capacitorsingle-core implementation at 10MHz operation.