Resource conservation and reduced environmental impact require more efficient, compact and intelligent energy management systems. The planned research project serves the use of novel passive components for integrated energy-efficient voltage converters for local voltage supply (Point-of-Load). Among other things, the project consortium will design, build and test a point-of-load demonstrator system. In this context, work is being done to solve a serious technical problem of current passive components, especially inductors: Using the novel passive devices already developed, inductors with inductance from nH to mH and capacitors with capacitance from pF to nF can be reconfigured from two-pin thin-film devices with a footprint of 101-105 mm2. State-of-the art inductors from nH to mH are currently an obstacle for the realization of highly integrated and energy efficient voltage converters due to the several orders of magnitude larger footprint of >106-107 mm2. Furthermore, there is no possibility to perform an operation-dependent reconfiguration between inductive and capacitive behavior. Both the extremely small footprint and the reconfigurability of the novel passive devices offer high innovation potential with respect to energy efficiency and phase-matched circuit design, which will be addressed in this funding project. This is particularly important for multiphase converters, which use a large number of parallel inductors to meet the increasing demands for highly efficient and powerful power supplies for modern microcontrollers and processors in important growth fields such as mobility, industrial, energy and biomedicine. This will be researched in the project with the participation of the industrial partners Würth Elektronik, Texas Instruments, Bosch and HZDR Innovation GmbH.

The project is funded by VDI Berlin under the number 16ES1119 (ES2FMK115).

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