Augmented Buck Converter Design using Resonant Circuits for Fast Transient Recovery

High-performance buck converters are often required in modern power electronic applications. An augmented buck converter (a main buck converter with augmentation circuits) can achieve fast transient recovery and small output voltage deviation. Compared with other augmentation circuits, a resonant augmentation circuit offers potential electromagnetic interference reduction due to the relatively low di/dt value and compacts the circuit through a reduced inductance for resonance. In this paper, the performance analysis of an augmented buck converter constructed with the resonant circuit are described in detail in terms of voltage-deviation band and power loss. A circuit design and control principle is also proposed for achieving the required voltage deviation for a given transient-detection delay. A 12-to-5-V converter prototype is built to verify the analysis and effectiveness of the proposed methodology. It is demonstrated that the voltage deviation is reduced from 360 to 200 mV using the proposed resonant augmentation circuits and control scheme. The efficiency study shows that the power loss varies from 0.02 to 0.72 W, when the repetition frequency of 5-to-10-A transients changes from 100 to 5 kHz.