SHF: Small: Design Methodology for Efficient and Reliable Medium-Power Point-of-Load Converters via In-Field Built-in Self-Calibration

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The past decade has experienced exponential demand for medium-power electronics to support a variety of applications including: automotive power management circuits for battery drain mitigation in electric vehicles, unmanned vehicles, satellite point-of-load converters, base-station electronics (e.g. Google's Project Loon, Facebook's Aquila Drone), and power management within solar (PV) arrays. The growing industrial need for these power electronics, primarily point-of-load (POL) power converters, has brought about a requirement for developing reliable solutions that maintain target specifications, including energy efficiency, over the lifetime of the application. These power converters are deployed in systems that have long-term field applications, and their performance must be able to withstand: temperature extremes, including high heat; aging effects, including threshold voltage and bias shifts; large fluctuations in output load (e.g. electric vehicles that draw large currents when accelerating); as well as radiation effects for space applications. The main objective of this project is to innovate POL hardware and design methodologies that ensure these medium-power converters maintain state-of-the-art performance over their lifetime, a significant improvement over existing POL hardware. Introducing these design methodologies in classrooms to both undergraduate and graduate students will prepare them for future careers in power management design. Disseminating the results of this research via conferences, workshops, and publications will build more synergy between industry and academia, and bring new awareness of power converter technologies and built-in self-test and calibration techniques. This objective of this project will be achieved by focusing on: 1) the proposed system design methodology and the associated reconfigurable controller and driver hardware for adaptable power converters, and 2) built-in-self-test and in-field calibration (BISTC) to monitor the converter parameters over the input range, and over time to ensure reliable operation and predict failure. The techniques so developed are to be integrated within the hardware because substantial gains on reliability and efficiency are only possible when power converter hardware and BISTC are jointly designed. This project will enable efficient, stable, and hence reliable converters for medium-power applications. Furthermore, the proposed built-in monitoring mechanisms will allow the design industry to easily collect aging information and fill this knowledge gap, as aging progression and patterns for power converters are largely unknown. This data can be used to further optimize the next generation systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.