AN ANALYSIS OF DC-DC CONVERTER EFFICIENCIES

With the increase in technology used in everyday life, the need for DC-DC converters has continued to increase. The efficiency of these converters is an essential parameter as an increase in a few percent can increase battery life by hours. There are several different factors that effect the efficiency of converters ranging from temperature, component selection, quiescent current and more. In this paper, a series of eleven DC-DC converters will be designed and tested in order to observe how the efficiencies and other parameters compare to the values provided in this datasheet. For this investigation two different PCBs were designed, one containing converters designed using the assistance of TI WEBENCH to select the semiconductor chip and necessary passive components, and one with a series of evaluation board modules. An additional three fully assembled evaluation boards were tested for a total of five buck converters, five LDOs and one boost converter. Through this investigation significant differences were found between the expected values provided in the datasheet and the measured values. These discrepancies can be accounted to a wide variety of sources such as component selection, PCB layout and precision of the measurement. This effort was documented in detail for the design, testing and analysis of the results.