EE Seminar

Power management circuits are essential components in every electronic device from laptops and cellphones to wearable and implantable devices. They perform the vital tasks of voltage conditioning and power control/harvesting from an input energy source. In a wireless-connected world, power consumption and form-factor are everything. Unfortunately, power management circuits consume a large fraction of electronic device power and size. They are one of the main reasons why your smart-watch, cellphone, or laptop runs out of battery power quite often and one of the factors defining its thickness. While various components of electronic systems, including analog and RF blocks, have been successfully integrated on the same application microchip, the power management circuits traditionally are left outside as discrete parts and occupy large board space due to the required magnetics.

In this talk, I will present new topologies of power conversion circuits that enable the integration of power management blocks directly on the application integrated circuit. This will enable new generations of portable and wearable electronics at ultra-small sizes and with increased efficiencies beyond state-of-the-art. In particular, I will illustrate novel switched-capacitor power conversion topologies that mitigate the main hurdle in replacing bulky inductive power delivery by addressing the discretized voltage conversion nature of capacitive converters. This research relies on inventing circuit topologies that enable tremendous size shrinkage without compromising high performance. Looking forward, this approach, which fully benefits from Moore's Law scaling, will open new frontiers in Internet-of-Things applications and more.