Discovery of Sneak Circuit Phenomena in Resonant Switched Capacitor DC-DC Converters

The sneak circuit phenomena were found in a family of resonant switched capacitor (RSC) DC-DC converters for the first time. Only would the disturbances of converter parameters or changes of operating condition lead to unexpected operation modes or cause undesired function of the converters. Some latent circuit paths within the RSC converters join in operation under certain conditions. A step-down RSC converter was used as an example to describe the sneak circuit phenomena and its condition by theoretical analysis and experiments. Furthermore, the proposed sneak circuit analysis method had been applied to the step-up and inverse RSC converters, and the corresponding conditions were obtained for their sneak circuit states