Texas Instruments Corporation

Nagarajan Sridhar

Yuanning Chen

Thomas Patrick Conroy

Richard K Hester

Jeffrey R Debord

Sairaj Vijaykumar Dhople

Jeffrey DeBord

A photovoltaic cell is provided as a composite unit together with elements of an integrated circuit on a common substrate. In a described embodiment, connections are established between a photovoltaic cell portion and a circuitry portion of an integrated structure to enable self-powering of the circuitry portion by the photovoltaic cell portion.

Self-powered integrated circuit with photovoltaic cell

Series strings of photovoltaic (PV) modules with integrated dc-dc microconverters that can function in buck, boost, or an intermediate bridge mode based on the load can harvest more energy than conventional central-inverter architectures, especially when the arrays are partially shaded or when the modules are mismatched. The integrated multi-mode dc-dc converter includes a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) algorithm that can track the true MPP, even when a PV module becomes partially-shaded, without scanning the entire output voltage range. The algorithm compares power levels only at a voltage that occurs when a bypass diode bypasses a portion of an associated PV module, and multiples thereof.

High efficiency wide load range buck/boost/bridge photovoltaic micro-converter

A photovoltaic cell is provided as a composite unit together with elements of an integrated circuit on a common substrate. In a described embodiment, connections are established between a multiple photovoltaic cell portion and a circuitry portion of an integrated structure to enable self-powering of the circuitry portion by the multiple photovoltaic cell portion.

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Plano, TX, United States of America

Nagarajan Sridhar