ROHM Releases Ultra-Compact Buck-Boost DC-DC Evaluation Board for Battery-Powered Devices

ROHM has introduced a new evaluation board, the BD83070GWL-EVK-002, built to showcase its BD83070GWL DC-DC converter IC, a chip designed around the combination of high efficiency and very low current draw.

The motivation behind this comes from a broader trend: wearables, mobile devices, and IoT gadgets are increasingly battery-powered and expected to be small, which puts pressure on the components inside them to shrink in size while also using less power to extend battery life. The BD83070GWL is ROHM's answer for devices running on small batteries or other limited power sources. It's a buck-boost converter, meaning it can either step voltage up or down as needed depending on the battery's charge state, and it achieves up to 97% efficiency with a quiescent current, the power the chip draws while idle, of just 2.8 microamps.

What's notable about the new evaluation board is how small ROHM managed to make it. Buck-boost converters typically need extra external components like coils and capacitors, which tend to increase board size, but ROHM's design uses just five components total, including the IC, a coil, and capacitors, to reach a mounting area of only 12.87 mm² (3.3 × 3.9 mm). That's described as a meaningful improvement over conventional buck-boost designs, even compared to versions with built-in coils. ROHM is also making the underlying reference d...