Switching power supplies

[Riad S. Wahby]

Chris Olesch <g13005 at 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