A Modified Area Product Based Design for High Frequency Planar Transformer Including Temperature Rise

Planar transformers are becoming a popular solution for high frequency and high-power density isolated DC-DC converters. However, their design is a complex task that usually needs several iterations. Area product-based design is one of the most used iterative methodologies for planar transformers design. In this paper, a modified area product-based design is proposed for planar transformer design (PT-MAP). It directly includes the temperature rise in the area product expression to accelerate the design process by reducing the number of iterations compared to the conventional area product (CAP). PT-MAP based design is applied to a 250W 150kHz planar transformer case study and compared to the CAP, then validated by electrothermal numerical modeling and measurements on a prototype.