Research Spotlight | Research Team Led by Gao Yuan at School of Microelectronics Publishes Power Management IC Achievements in IEEE CICC 2023

2025-10-29 Research News views：1

From April 23 to 26, the 2023 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC), a top-tier conference in the field of integrated circuit design, was held in San Antonio, Texas, USA. A paper from the research team led by Gao Yuan at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) Shenzhen-Hong Kong Microelectronics College, titled "A Li-ion Battery Input 96.8% Peak Efficiency Single-Inductor Off-Chip-Capacitor-Free 2-Switch LED Driver with Two-Color Mixing Capability," was accepted by the conference and nominated for the Best Student Paper Award. The nomination ratio for the Best Paper Award at CICC 2023 was 14 out of 121 papers, with only two papers from institutions in China as the first affiliation—one from SUSTech and the other from Tsinghua University. The paper's first author, Tong Caiyu, a Class of 2020 master's student from the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Microelectronics College, delivered an oral presentation at the conference and participated in the Best Paper Poster Presentation.

Image 1: Tong Caiyu delivering an oral presentation at the conference

With the widespread application of lithium-ion batteries and solid-state lighting technology, lithium battery-driven LED lighting systems have broad application prospects. However, the overlapping voltage ranges of lithium battery output and LED forward voltage pose challenges for both traditional buck-boost solutions and recently proposed hybrid buck-boost structures in achieving high efficiency and high integration simultaneously. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel LED driver circuit that uses only an inductor as the sole off-chip component, requires no off-chip capacitor, and employs two on-chip NMOS transistors as power switches, thereby achieving high integration for both the system and the chip. Furthermore, compared to other lithium battery-input LED drivers, the proposed circuit architecture offers efficiency advantages (96.8% peak efficiency) and supports wide-range PWM dimming from 0.5% to 99.5% duty cycle, along with additional color mixing functionality, significantly enhancing both performance and features.

Image 2: (a) System framework of the proposed LED driver circuit; (b) Chip micrograph; (c) Schematic of system operating states and color temperature adjustment implementation; (d) Test waveforms.

The paper's supervising author is Assistant Professor Gao Yuan. Other authors include Fan Zihao, a Class of 2018 undergraduate student from the School. The research received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation, and the SUSTech Research Start-up Funds.

Image 3: Tong Caiyu at the Best Paper Poster Presentation session

This also marks the second consecutive year that SUSTech has published papers at CICC with independently trained graduate students as first authors (A paper by Qiao Hongchang, a Class of 2019 PhD student from the research team of Zhan Chenchang at the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Microelectronics College, was published at CICC 2022: https://doi.org/10.1109/CICC53496.2022.9772855).

About CICC

The IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) is one of the premier conferences in the field of integrated circuit design. Organized by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and co-sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society, CICC is a highly influential conference for discussing new technologies in IC design and for networking with peers, authors, and industry experts. The CICC 2023 conference showcased numerous first-reported research works and innovative circuit technologies addressing practical problems, covering cutting-edge research areas in integrated circuits such as ultra-high-speed data converters, low-power digital circuits, gate drivers and GaN integrated circuits, low-power quantum computing, sensors, DC-DC converters, and machine learning.