A 2-kW 100-kHz power converter

The literature contains many papers on resonant switching power converters and their main drawbacks, such as the variable driving frequency. In this paper, we show another approach to the design of switched converters that takes its origin from the high-power converters based on thyristors. It is well known that thyristors are switched off at "zero current" by firing a current oscillation with an auxiliary circuit. These converters work at fixed frequency driven with the pulsewidth modulation technique. We have replaced thyristors with faster devices like insulated gate bipolar transistors and have reused the same ideas at high frequencies (100 kHz), showing that good performance and efficiency can be easily obtained.