Power Delivery for Untethered UAVs

The untethered class of UAV relies on battery, fuel cell, or solar power, which puts greater demands on tradeoffs to meet range and payload performance specifications. Vicor's zero-voltage switching (ZVS) buck and buck-boost regulators offer board-level designers maximum power density and flexibility for up to 98% efficient point of load (POL) DC-DC regulation. These high-performance ZVS topology regulators are integrated with control circuitry, power semiconductors, and support components. They support single wire current sharing for higher power capability in a high-density LGA, BGA, and system in package (SiP). The high switching frequency of the ZVS regulators reduces the size of the external filtering components, improving power density while enabling fast line and load dynamic response. The ZVS series offers buck regulators for 12 V_IN, 24 V_IN, and 48 V_IN nominal systems. All devices within their respective series share the same footprint.

Untethered UAV power sources also deliver widely varying or nonlinear output voltages that are handled better with power conversion and delivery solutions that use non-traditional topologies instead of the standard PWM (pulse width modulation) techniques and are far better at meeting the very demanding power requirements.

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