Advantages of Paralleling Inductors-on-Silicon in High Frequency Power Converters

In general power supplies are moving towards higher switching frequencies to reduce the size of passive components; the ultimate goal is to facilitate the integration of active and passive components on a single silicon chip providing a Power Supply on Chip (PSoC). The purpose of this work is to show that distributing inductors-on-silicon in parallel can increase the output current and reduce losses while also maintaining the same overall footprint area and the same effective inductance as a single micro-inductor. The performance of distributed micro-inductors is compared in a range of parallel micro-inductor configurations to show which configuration provides the best overall performance in terms of circuit size, conversion efficiency and power handling. For that purpose, detailed analysis of the performance of all power components (inductors and MOSFETs) is carried out.