Piezoelectric-Based Power Conversion: Recent Progress, Opportunities, and Challenges

Abstract

Pursuits of miniaturization, greater performance, and lower cost for power electronics necessitate advancement of power passive component technologies. While wide-bandgap semiconductor devices and advanced control techniques have enabled substantial size and performance improvements, miniaturizing power electronics remains bottlenecked by the passive components dominating their sizes, particularly magnetics (i.e., inductors and transformers). Magnetic components pose fundamental power handling and efficiency challenges at small scales, amounting to lower power densities at low volume [1]–[3]. On the other hand, switched capacitor converters have achieved record-breaking power densities and efficiencies, but these architectures still require magnetics for efficient voltage regulation. While several miniaturization strategies have been developed despite the limitations of magnetics (e.g., higher switching frequencies, more sophisticated circuit topologies and operating techniques, and improved magnetic designs), they ultimately still face the same scaling impediments. This motivates investigation into alternative passive component technologies for power conversion that can provide the same high-level functionalities as magnetics but with superior scalability to small sizes.