Self-oscillating Galvanic Isolated Bidirectional Very High Frequency DC-DC Converter

This paper describes a galvanic isolated bidirectional Very High Frequency (VHF = 30 MHz - 300MHz) Class-E converter. The reason for increasing the switching frequency is to minimize the passive components in the converter. To make the converter topology bidirectional the rectifier has to be synchronous. This increases the complexity of the gate drives, which in this paper is solved by using a self-oscillating gate drive. A bidirectional converter has been implemented and is described in this paper; the converter reaches efficiencies above 80% in forward conduction mode and 73.5% in reverse conduction mode. The designed converter operates at a switching frequency of 35.6 MHz, which is well within the VHF range. The same converter is also implemented with PCB embedded inductors to minimize cost and the physical volume of the total converter.