Compact architectures for dc-dc converters with galvanic isolation

This thesis summarizes the main activities that I have been carried out during three years of Ph.D. studies at the RF-ADC, a joint research group between University of Catania and STMicroelectronics Catania. Recently, galvanic isolation for both power supply and data communication is becoming mandatory in several application fields to guarantee safety and reliability, especially in harsh operative environments. A wide range of applications adopts galvanic isolation, e.g., sensor interfaces, serial link transceivers, low-power medical devices, and housekeeping power, such as gate-drivers or controllers for power converters. By referring to the main limitations of the state of the art solutions, this work presents three novel architectures, which implement galvanically isolated dc dc converters with different target of applications. The main object of the proposed systems is the reduction of the number of isolated links while preserving both power and data functionalities.