Improving the light load efficiency and THD of PFC converters using a Line Cycle Skipping method

Light load efficiency and total harmonic distortion (THD) of AC-DC converters is of increasing importance when considering the increase in non-linear electronic loads on the modern grid. Efficiency and THD standards are becoming stricter in their requirements to account for this increase in non-linear loads. To address the increasing requirements for higher efficiency and lower THD without increasing the cost or complexity of the design, a Line Cycle Skipping (LCS) method is proposed and its digital control implementation presented. A 100W universal line input voltage PFC boost converter prototype is built to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.