A low-volume power management module for portable applications based on a multi-output switched-capacitor circuit

This paper introduces a 2-stage power management architecture for battery powered portable applications. The presented topology combines a fixed ratio multi-output switched capacitor converter stage with two-input buck converters to achieve low volume and high power processing efficiency. Experimental comparisons with a two-cell battery input conventional 5 V bus architecture, providing 15 W of total power in three different voltage outputs, demonstrate up to 50% reduction in the inductances of the downstream converter stages and up to 53% reduction in losses, equivalent to the improvement of the power processing efficiency of 12%.