Chris Olesch <g13005@gmail.com> wrote:
reading thru rsw's thesis as well.
I doubt you want to use anything so zany :) What you're talking about is a relatively high power design, which means that in addition to worrying about designing the switching supply, you're going to have to sweat the practical details regarding PCB layout, et cetera. I'd have a look at some of the reference designs and application notes from the usual suspects (onsemi.com, ti.com, maxim-ic.com, linear.com), since they will have a lot of good practical information on getting the supply built. For example, http://www.onsemi.com/PowerSolutions/taxonomy.do?id=448 seems to have a substantial amount of reference material available. For more general information on theory and practice of dc/dc converter design, "Fundamentals of Power Electronics 2e" by Erickson and Maksimovic is my go-to reference. It more or less assumes you're already an electrical engineer, which may or may not be useful to you. Along these lines there's also "Principles of Power Electronics" by Kassakian et al, a book dear to me but certainly not to all. If you're looking for a gentler introduction, Google should be able to point you to a few tutorials, e.g., http://www.maximintegrated.com/app-notes/index.mvp/id/2031 I've been kicking around an idea for a weird little buck converter controller that I haven't actually built yet. It's not particularly well- suited for kW converters, though, since the most basic form of the idea involves using a P-channel device for the high side switch. For any reasonable amount of power you end up wanting to use an N-ch, as they're generally higher performance devices than their P-ch counterparts (in silicon, hole mobility is about 1/3 of electron mobility, so devices that control electrons are generally higher performance than devices that control holes). Cypherpunks build circuits, -=rsw