High efficiency and smooth transition buck-boost converter for extending battery life in portable devices

This paper presents a high-efficiency and smooth-transition buck-boost (BB) converter to extend the battery life of portable devices. Owing to the usage of four switches, the BB control topology needs to minimize the switching and conduction losses at the same time. Therefore, over a wide input voltage range, the proposed BB converter consumes minimum switching loss like the basic operation of buck or boost converter. Besides, the conduction loss is reduced by means of the reduction of the inductor current level. Especially, the proposed BB converter offers good line/load regulation and thus provides a smooth and stable output voltage when the battery voltage decreases. Simulation results show that the output voltage drops is very small during the whole battery life time and the output transition is very smooth during the mode transition by the proposed BB control scheme.