Michelle Hartsell, Product Engineer at Texas Instruments, discusses how for automotive electronics systems' designers maintaining a continuous V to critical subsystems during cold-crank, start-stop, load-dump or weak car battery conditions is extremely important. Conventional magnetically coupled coil transformer based solutions are bulky and costly. Implementing a buck-boost converter with integrated switches reduces external components and is therefore a space-saving and cost-effective solution to voltage regulation in automotive electronic systems.