IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO.

4, DECEMBER 2004 131

Buck or Boost Tracking Power Converter

Pallab Midya, Senior Member, IEEE, Ken Haddad, Member, IEEE, and Matt Miller, Member, IEEE

Abstract—A cascade of buck and boost converter is presented

here. The control operates in a manner that the converter is ei-
ther in buck or boost (BOB) mode on a cycle by cycle basis. It
transitions between the modes seamlessly to provide a tracking
power conversion function for modulating the power supply of a
variable envelope radio frequency (RF) power amplifier. The con-
trol algorithm and its implementation using switched capacitor cir-
cuits is described. Simulation and measured experimental results
including converter efficiency, tracking accuracy, and spectrum at
the output of the RF power amplifier are provided. This control
technique allows seamless transition between the buck and boost Fig. 1. BOB converter schematic.
modes while tracking RF envelopes with bandwidth greater than
100 kHz, and maintaining extreme accuracy and extremely low the supply, without the use of transformers or voltage inversion
ripple. The efficiency of this converter operating at 1.68 MHz is
close to 90% over a wide range of conversion ratios. The area of the the buck or boost (BOB) converter was designed. Fig. 1 shows
power converter is extremely small allowing this to be integrated a schematic of the converter. It needs a single inductor and 2
into a cellular telephone. The controller was integrated as part of active switches. The circuit in Fig. 1 is not novel and [2] uses
a larger power management IC as well as a discrete IC. a similar circuit to produce a fixed 3.3 V output as the battery
Index Terms—Buck boost converter, envelope following, supply voltage varies between 2.5 V and 5.5 V. A second inductor is
modulation, tracking power cenverter, two switch buck boost con- necessary in this application for suppression of the ripple by
verter. 75 dB. Sensorless current mode (SCM) control [3] is a fast con-
trol technique suitable for fast tracking power converter applica-
I. INTRODUCTION tions. In [4] a number of power converters are explored that only
need a single switch while providing wide conversion range.

T HE radio frequency (RF) transmitter in certain wireless

phones consumes a major portion of the output power.
With advances in semiconductor technology, the voltage and
However, for integrated applications requiring high efficiency
the topology in Fig. 1 is more suitable.
For converting between rectified AC mains to a fixed dc
power consumption of digital circuits per unit computation voltage for PFC and UPS applications the topology in Fig. 1
is decreasing rapidly. By contrast, the RF transmitter has to has been used in [5]–[7]. In both PFC and UPS applications,
transmit and therefore, consume a minimum amount of power. one of the source, or load, is a widely varying voltage while
Further, efficient use of the RF spectrum requires the use of RF the other is a constant dc battery or bus. In this case the source
signals with variable envelope and phase. These signals must be is a constant dc while the load is a widely varying dc output.
produced with high linearity using class AB amplifiers which Control agility required is quite low since the output sine wave
are very inefficient. Variation in the battery voltage from fully frequency lies between 50 Hz and 400 Hz. One of the names
charged to end of charge makes the class AB amplifier even for this topology is a two switch buck-boost. The control for
less efficient. The class AB amplifier has to be biased such that these applications is done in [8], [9] by first deciding a buck or
it can provide the peak power without clipping at the lowest boost mode using a comparison between the input and output
battery voltage. Consequently, at the highest battery voltage voltages. This results in a glitch when the system transitions
the efficiency is lowered even for peak-power output. The from one mode to the other. In [2] an intermediate mode where
efficiency of a class AB amplifier operated close to saturation is both sets of switches are transitioning is introduced between
often close to 50% whereas, the efficiency of the same amplifier the buck and boost modes. This results in a dip in efficiency
operating over the variable RF envelope and variable battery which is clearly shown in [2]. Certain aspects of this work is
voltage may be about 20%. covered by U.S. patent no. 6348781 [10].
If instead the RF amplifier is operated at a supply voltage
which tracks the RF envelope the efficiency can be doubled. II. TRANSITION BETWEEN BUCK AND BOOST MODES
This is called envelope following and was introduced in [1]. To
provide this variable voltage which can be both above or below One of the challenges of the design is to transition between
the buck and boost modes without any distortion during the
transition. Further, to maximize efficiency, the converter must
Manuscript received March 24, 2004; revised November 15, 2004. Recom-
mended by Associate Editor S. K. Mazumder. switch only one set of switches (buck or boost) in any one cycle.
P. Midya and M. Miller are with the Freescale Semiconductor, Previous work [11] actually forbid this to ensure low distortion
Kemper Lakes Corporate Center, Lake Zurich, IL 60047 USA (email: during the transition.
[email protected]).
K. Haddad is with Motorola, Schaumburg, IL 60196 USA. The transition problem was solved by starting each cycle with
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPEL.2004.840739 the buck switch on (or set) and the boost switch off (or reset).
1540-7985/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

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132 IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2004

Fig. 2. Ramps and switching waveforms for different buck and boost ratios.

There is a pair of ramps, one for buck and one for boost. The
buck ramp rises and the boost ramp falls such that at the end of
the cycle they intersect. The error feedback signal must inter-
sect one of the two ramps. If the error signal intersects the buck
signal the buck switch is turned off for part of the cycle and the
BOB converter is in buck mode. In this cycle the boost switch is
never turned on. If the error signal intersects the boost ramp the
boost switch is turned on. In this cycle the buck switch is never
turned off. There is additional logic to latch the switching sig-
nals so that a glitch in the error signal does not cause both sets of
switches to transition in a given cycle. In the switched capacitor
implementation the duty ratios are quantized with a fairly coarse
granularity. Thus, the converter may chatter between buck and
boost modes, but the smallest on or off time is at least one cycle
of the switched capacitor clock period.
Fig. 3. Continuous-time implementation of BOB feedback control.

III. SENSORLESS CURRENT MODE FEEDBACK

The feedback structure is a variation of SCM (sensorless cur-
rent mode) control applied to the BOB converter. SCM has been
modified to avoid the use of a switch in the feedback structure.
The feedback signal is given by

For this control, the equal slope criteria (ramp slope equal
to current feedback slope) can be easily implemented for the
boost mode. In the buck mode the equal slope criteria is met
at duty ratio equal to unity and degrades as the duty ratio is
reduced. Fig. 2 shows the switching signals, feedback signal
and the ramps, under different duty ratios and switching modes.
The lowest waveform is the clock signal. Above that are the Fig. 4. Switched-capacitor implementation of BOB feedback control.
switching waveforms for the buck and boost waveforms. The
buck switch is always on when the boost switch transitions. Sim-
ilarly the boost switch is always off when the buck switch tran- The use of SCM in this application reduced the gain band-
sitions. Waveforms for the different voltage transfer ratios are width requirement of the feedback opamp significantly. SCM
drawn all the way from to . eliminated the need for current sensing and noise issues related

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MIDYA et al.: BUCK OR BOOST TRACKING POWER CONVERTER 133

to it. At the relatively high switching frequency of 1.68 MHz

and the low noise requirements of the load, which is an RF trans-
mitter, these advantages are critical.

IV. INTEGRATED FEEDBACK IMPLEMENTATION

The feedback network was integrated for reducing parts
count. The options of a continuous time or switched capacitor
implementation are shown in Figs. 3 and 4, respectively. For a
continuous time implementation there needs to be a tuning of
the RC network to compensate for variation over process and
temperature. This would be feasible since a fixed frequency
clock is readily available in the radio. However, the contin-
uous time approach was not chosen for the implementation.
A switched capacitor implementation was chosen despite the
drawback of the noise associated with the quantization of Fig. 5. Signal waveforms tracking RF envelope.
the duty ratio. The extreme spectral requirements of the RF
transmitter were met even in the presence of this quantization
noise. In the switched capacitor implementation the signal Sig
and the ramp are computed every clock cycle and sampled and
held till the next cycle.

V. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

The four switches were implemented in two chipfet packages
measuring 3.1 mm 1.7 mm. The two inductors had dimen-
sions of mm mm mm. The peak power out of
the BOB converter was about 8 W. The estimated bandwidth
achieved in the converter is higher than 300 kHz. In Fig. 5, we Fig. 6. Measured efficiency of BOB converter.
see the BOB converter track a reference waveform going both
above and below the input voltage. The tracking accuracy is very
high as shown by overlaying the reference and output wave-
forms. The switching functions of both buck and boost switches
are also overlaid showing the seamless transition from buck to
boost and back. The absence of any buckboost region can also
be seen. The envelope shown corresponds to an entire burst of
the RF signal. Fig. 6 shows the efficiency of BOB as a function
of output voltage for a given input voltage. In comparable im-
plementations that go through a buck-boost region there is a dip
in the efficiency when the input and output voltages are close.
Also note that this efficiency is achieved at a higher switching
frequency than in [2]. The total losses have been optimized such
that the conduction losses and switching losses in the switch are
approximately equal. The losses in the passive components are
less than 3% of the total power.
Fig. 7 shows the spectrum of the RF power amplifier. Lin- Fig. 7. Spectrum of RF power amplifier with BOB converter providing supply
earization has been used to correct for nonlinearity of the power voltage.
amplifier. The challenge for the BOB design was to make sure
that the linearization loop was not disturbed by errors in the IC as well as a discrete part. Fig. 9 shows a die plot of the dis-
switcher output. The efficiency of the RF power amplifier was crete part. Note that the total die area is equivalent to 20 mil
almost doubled with no significant degradation of the output 20 mil .
spectrum. The switching frequency at the switcher output had
to be suppressed by more than 70 dB to meet this requirement. VI. CONCLUSION
Fig. 8 shows measured time domain waveforms of the BOB
converter. The reference voltage, converter output voltage, in- The BOB architecture and control makes it possible to track
termediate node voltages, and the variable impedance of the RF both above and below the input battery voltage with no po-
power amplifier which is the load for the BOB converter are larity inversion. This structure is efficient both from the point
plotted. The impedance range varies over an order of magnitude of view of power conversion efficiency as well as the size of
being the largest at low voltages and lowest at high voltages. storage components. Seamless tracking between the buck and
BOB was implemented as part of a larger power management boost modes with very high tracking bandwidth and SNR is

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134 IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS LETTERS, VOL. 2, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2004

radio unit. Switched capacitor circuitry has been successfully

used for implementing the feedback control.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to acknowledge the efforts of the team of
IC designers who worked on the BOB design including L. Con-
nell, E. Dagher, S. Iyengar, J. Phillips, D. Feldt, and T. Wu. The
contributions of the team that helped put the BOB converter suc-
cessfully in the iDEN phone included G. Leizerovich, G. Eng-
lish, G. Tong, J. Smith, R. Miller, A. Tan, T. Heffield, and A.
Verma.

REFERENCES
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