| Summary: | Miniaturization and efficiency of power electronics are limited by magnetic components, which are difficult to scale to small size and high frequency (HF). Inductor structures using field shaping, quasi-distributed gaps, and modular construction can achieve low loss at HF (3-30 MHz) without litz wire. For widespread adoption though, these structures must be shown to remain effective across a wide design range and be economical to manufacture. This article investigates the design flexibility of one such previously proposed inductor structure with a modified pot core and demonstrates that this structure can provide excellent performance for a wide range of inductance and power handling requirements using only a few sets of manufactured core pieces. The core pieces used in the modified pot core structure can be scaled by 4× in volume, compared to roughly 2× for conventional core families, and still achieve high performance over a wide design space. Moreover, this approach can achieve about half the loss of conventional designs at HF and, unlike conventional core sets, can provide a range of low-loss form factors with a single family of components. The proposed inductor structure and design approaches, thus, offer new opportunities in the practical production of low-loss HF inductors.
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