Interleaved buck converters with a single-capacitor turn-off snubber

Abstract

This paper proposes interleaved buck converters with a single-capacitor snubber to smooth out switch turn-off transition. The single-capacitor snubber is used to limit rising rate of drain-source voltage of the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) switch in the converters to reduce turn-off loss. In addition, the converters are operated at the boundary of continuous and discontinuous conduction modes (CCM), (DCM) to reduce turn-on loss, and in an interleaving fashion to reduce output current ripple. As compared with the counterparts of conventional converter topologies, the proposed converters have the merits of less component count, higher efficiency over a certain load range, smaller size, and they are easier to implement. Hardware measurements obtained from experimental prototypes have verified these merits. © 2004 IEEE.