Benefitsofaddinganactiveclamptoasynchronousflyback.PDFVIP

Benefits of adding an active clamp to a synchronous flyback power supply By John Betten and Brian King, Texas Instruments Incorporated Flyback converters are a popular choice in applications that require an isolated power supply to deliver low to medium output power. When efficiency is a primary concern, you can replace the flyback output diode with a MOSFET, resulting in what is commonly referred to as a synchronous flyback converter. POE (power-over-Ethernet) applications are prime candidates for synchronous flyback supplies. Presently, the input power for POE supplies is limited to 12.95W. Maximizing the efficiency of the power supply allows the system to deliver more power to the load. You can gain further improvements to the converter’s efficiency by using an active-clamp controller to reduce the snubber and shoot-through losses. Active-clamp forward converters have been an increasingly popular choice in higher power applications. Yet few power-supply designers are aware that they can also employ an active clamp in flyback converters. To investigate the benefits of the active- clamp control in a flyback topology, we designed, built, and tested two power supplies to the specification shown in Table 1. Both power supplies use synchronous rectification on the secondary, but one uses the power transformer to drive the synchronous FET; the other uses a gate-drive transformer and also implements an active clamp. The POE input requirements inspired the specifications, but we extended the input range to cover telecom applications. In the interest of a fair comparison, we kept major components not affected by the differences in the two approaches identical in both designs. Figure 1 shows photos of each circuit. We also kept component placement and layout common for both boards. The most noticeable difference between the two circuits is the addition of a gate-drive transformer in the active-clamp circuit. Paramet