Patent ID: 8810226

Claim:
A method, comprising: controlling a duty cycle of a DC/DC-converter to generate a bias voltage; biasing a semiconductor based component with the bias voltage, wherein a value of the bias voltage prevents the semiconductor based component from exceeding a breakthrough voltage thereof, wherein controlling the duty cycle comprises: combining a second value depending on a voltage at the semiconductor component with a reference value to generate an error value; determining a first value of the duty cycle of the DC/DC-converter based on the error value; and setting the duty cycle to a second value of the duty cycle by limiting the value of the duty cycle of the DC/DC-converter to a predetermined value, wherein the predetermined value is determined by: stepwise increasing the reference value until the error value exceeds a predetermined limit; taking an output voltage of the DC/DC-converter at a time when the error value exceeds the predetermined limit as the breakthrough voltage of the semiconductor component; and setting the predetermined value to be less than a third value of the duty cycle associated with the error value exceeding the predetermined limit.