A sensor concept for minimizing body diode conduction losses in DC/DC converters

This paper describes a novel sensor concept to detect body diode conduction in DC/DC converters. The sensor output can be used to optimize the switching sequence of the power transistors in order to increase the converter efficiency in the range of 2 %. Because of the simple sensor structure it is fast, robust and the power consumption is low. Therefore the proposed Body Diode Conduction Sensor (BDCS) is suited especially for high frequency DC/DC converters. BDCS and output stage are implemented in a 65 nm CMOS technology.