Design, manufacturing and characterization of printed circuit board embedded inductors for power applications

The Printed-Circuit-Board (PCB) technology is attractive for power electronic systems as it offers a low manufacturing cost for mass production. Power inductors are large and complex to manufacture, because they usually are custom components which must be wound individually. Inductors based on PCB technology can reduce the complexity and cost while using a wasted space (the thickness of said PCB). In this paper, a procedure to design such inductors is summarized, with a focus on inductors intended to be implemented in converters in the 100-1000 W range. The main contribution of this paper is the description of the manufacturing process : the inductors use PCB to host their magnetic core while their winding is made by patterning the PCB copper layers and using copper vias. In addition, new experimental results are presented : the prototypes are electrically characterized, and the results are discussed to present the advantages and drawbacks of this technology, as well as the remaining open questions.