Abstract
This paper presents a structural approach to synthesizing soft switching PWM converters based on the concept of basic converter units (BCUs). With a proper reconfiguration, several families of passive and active soft switching PWM converters can be synthesized from either buck BCU or boost BCU plus certain linear networks. These typical soft switching converters include the well known topologies of buck, buck-boost, Zeta, boost, 'Cuk and Sepic. It has been shown that analysis of the converters can be conveniently performed from the derived general configurations, reducing the complexity significantly. Therefore, using the structural approach not only can explore more physical insights into the converters in a family, but can reveal more relationships among these soft switching converters over conventional approaches. These merits have made the proposed approach become uniquely valuable.