Timothy Hegarty
Today, in an era of intense competition, the challenge for product designers is to stay ahead of the pack and not merely walk in lockstep with it. This ups the ante for system designers to innovate with differentiated products.
One important way to innovate is with high-density designs. In the push for smaller-footprint solutions, power system designers are now focusing on the question of power density – the output power per unit of area or volume of a power converter circuit.
The most visible example of DC/DC converter printed circuit board (PCB) layout for high density relates to power stage component placement and routing. Careful layout can coincide with better switching performance, lower component temperatures and reduced electromagnetic interference (EMI) signatures. Consider the power stage layout and schematic in Figure 1.
As I see it, these are the challenges when designing high-density DC/DC converters:
With these challenges in mind, I recently wrote a three-part series for EDN titled “DC/DC Converter PCB Layout” that delves into PCB layout in detail. It includes a list of PCB layout guidelines structured as a checklist to aid designers during layout. The essential steps in the PCB design flow for DC/DC converters are:
In part 2 of this blog series, I’ll unveil a high-density buck-converter layout – a 25A point-of-load design in a 20mm-by-11mm footprint.
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