Design of a Modular Multiphase Buck Converter with Dynamic Phase Control

This work presents a dynamic phase control method for a multiphase modular buck converter in applications aiming for zero downtime, such as data centers. A key concept of the work is that the design of the voltage regulation converter has a switchable modular power stage that can be installed or removed while the converter is still operating. This allows converters to stay online while a sub-module can be repaired or upgraded to higher power. To achieve this, a control strategy has been developed that allows for an arbitrary number of converter phases that dynamically adapt to different numbers of phases. The simulation results show that the control method successfully achieves phase module installation and removal while the multiphase buck converter is still operating, and each phase current automatically balances to the target ratio.