Abstract
Power conversion circuits are essential components in every electronic device from laptops and cellphones to wearable and implantable devices. These circuits convert the DC voltage of the battery or energy source to the appropriate DC level or AC form required by a load. The key challenge of this class of circuits is that they often define the size and energy of an electronic system. This is since the volume-size and quality-factor of the required large inductors render power conversion circuits disproportionately large and lossy to the rest of the electronic
system.
My research aims to make power conversion circuits smaller without losing power efficiency by inventing circuit topologies that largely rely on capacitors instead of large inductors. These converter topologies thus can be integrated on the system microchip in advanced technologies. In this talk, I will discuss the theoretical basis as well as the experimental results of new switched capacitor converter topologies that I developed for microchip power management. I will show how to architect the governing current and voltage equations in a switched capacitor converter to enable new topologies that score the minimum loss and the smallest volume size as compared to prior topologies. The new topologies thus can make switched capacitor converters as efficient as the industry’s flagship inductor-based solution, however in orders-of-magnitude smaller sizes. Moving forward, such an approach of relying on electric instead of magnetic energy transfer enables the exploitation of fabrication- technology feature-size scaling to shrink the total electronic system size and weight beyond what is feasible through today’s technologies. This opens the doors for pioneering applications from picowatt bacteria-propelled robotic microchips to kilowatt wirelessly-powered electric vehicles from the roadway.
Biography
Loai Salem is an assistant professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California San Diego in 2018, the M.Sc. degree in microelectronics system design from Nile University, Egypt, in 2011, and the B.Sc. degree in electronics and communication engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, in 2008. His research interests include the design of efficient DC-to-DC/AC power converters using innovative circuits in scaled CMOS for a range of applications from high power to biomedical systems.
Prof. Salem was a recipient of the 2017 IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society Predoctoral Achievement Award, the 2016 International Solid-State Circuits Conference Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award, and the ECE Departmental Fellowship at the University of California, San Diego.