Patent attributes
Circuits and methods are provided for voltage conversion within a switched-capacitor converter (SCC). The SCC includes multiple switch stages cascaded together. Each switch stage includes two half bridges connected in parallel. Each half bridge has a high and low-side switch connected at a switching node. The switching nodes of each half bridge of each switch stage are coupled to corresponding switching nodes of some other switch stage via capacitors. The switches are controlled such that during a first interval, a phase A capacitor attached to each switch stage is charged while a phase B capacitor is discharged. During a second interval, the phase B capacitor is charged while the phase A capacitor is discharged. By alternating the intervals thusly, one of the capacitors coupled to each switch stage is nearly always discharging such that it can provide current to an output of the SCC or some adjacent switch stage.
