It has been reported that the efficiency of a low voltage power supply is improved by replacing diodes in an output-stage with synchronous rectifiers (SR). A SR consists of a bipolar junction transistor with a low-saturation voltage and a current transformer. Although the SR has low offset-voltage, its reverse recovery characteristic is usually poor. In this paper, an RCD circuit which improves the reverse recovery characteristic of the SR is proposed. This circuit is simple, and it is composed of a diode, a capacitor and a resistor. The analysis and the experimental results of the SR with the proposed RCD circuit are presented. The optimum design of the RCD to improve the reverse recovery characteristic of SR is discussed.

In this paper we clarify for the boost and the buck-boost converter that the ripple effect is not ignorable for the frequency response, and reveal that it causes the unexpected characteristics where either the phase lag or the phase lead appears depending on the shape of waveform of the ramp generator in the PWM circuit. Eventually the phase margin for the stability drastically changes depending on the slope direction (normal or reverse) of the sawtooth waveform of the ramp generator even in the same circuit configuration. For the ripple effects we propose the general analysis model and analyze them of the boost and the buck-boost converters. As the result we identify that the ripple effects are caused mainly by the variation of the slope and the average of the ripple, and reveal that the both converters have the asymmetric characteristics for the slope direction of the sawtooth waveform of the ramp generator and there is more advantage for the stability in case of the reverse slope direction than in case of the normal one. It also clarified that the effect of ESR of the output capacitor of the converter on the frequency response is different according to the shape of the sawtooth waveforms. The proposed analysis method is validated by the experiments and simulations.