LabAdviser/Technology Research/Nanofabrication of Inductive Components for Integrated Power Supply On Chip

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Nanofabrication of Inductive Components for Integrated Power Supply On Chip

• Project type: Ph.d project
• Project responsible: Hoà Lê Thanh
• Supervisors: Flemming Jensen (Main), Anpan Han (Co), Ziwei Ouyang (Co), Arnold Knott (CO)
• Partners involved: DTU Danchip, DTU Elektro

Project description

Power supplies are essential sub-systems to power electronic devices. They can be found in almost all electronic devices, from traditional electrical devices such as cars, televisions, CD players, and cellular phones to modern intelligent electronic devices and systems such as wearable devices, light emitting diode (LED) applications, and internet of things (IoTs). As more functions are packed in a limited space in such electronic systems, power supplies are required to be more compact and more efficient with a lower manufacture cost. Hence, miniaturization has become the main trend for developing future generation of power supplies.

One way of miniaturization is monolithic integration of power supplies or so-called power supply on chip (PwrSoC). The PwrSoC vision is to integrate all active and passive power electronics components on one chip. Higher integration lowers the cost and increases both efficiency and power density. On the evolution route towards PwrSoC, the intermediate short-term solution is power supply in package (PSiP) in which the discrete inductors and capacitors are co-packaged together with the power management integrated circuits. SMPS, which incorporate a switching regulator to convert electrical power efficiently, are widely investigated for PSiP and PwrSoC due to its high efficiency and high power density. It is evident that the development of such integrated SMPS will play an important role in future civilization and also in the fight against climate change.

A challenge for developing integrated SMPS is to miniaturize bulky energy-storing elements e.g. inductors. Inductors are by far the most bulky and lossy components in the SMPS circuits, therefore, miniaturizing power inductors is needed. One route is to increase the switching frequency of SMPS that enables the use of smaller inductors with lower inductance value, thus reducing the overall size of SMPS. The evolution of integrated power supplies is highly correlated to the increase in the switching frequency, for example 8 - 20 MHz for co-packaged or stacked PSiP and to 30 - 300 MHz of VHF range for PwrSoC. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology is a promising solution that has a great potential for heterogeneous integration of microinductors.