Design of A 3-Level Buck Converter with 92.3% Peak Efficiency

This paper presents a self-sustainable 3-level buck converter design with achieving the self-balancing of the flying capacitor voltage. The designed converter consists of a control circuit, a logic control circuit and a gate driver circuit with bootstrap. The proposed converter achieves stepping down the input voltage of 5 V to the output voltage of 1 V. The work does not need any extra loop to balance the flying capacitor voltage to half of the supply voltage. The proposed converter is verified through the simulation. For a load current step of 1 A, undershoot (overshoot) voltage and setting time are 50 mV (40mV) and 50 µs (43 µs), respectively. The converter achieves a peak efficiency of 92.3%.