Dual Output Hybrid Converter for 48 V Data Centers: M-HS

Inhalt:
In the quest for energy-efficient and dependable power distribution solutions for 48 V data centers, novel converter topologies have emerged in recent years, both within the Industry and Academia. The two-stage approach remains the most prevalent architecture for stepping down the input 48 V in two stages: initially, an intermediate voltage rail is obtained by employing an IBC (Intermediate Bus Converter), and then a VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) is utilized to regulate the ASIC core voltage. In this study, a dual-output IBC provides multiple voltage outputs from a single conversion stage within a 48 V architecture. The proposed conversion is an 8:1 + 4:1 conversion, where the 8:1 rail is designated as a high-performance VRM voltage supply, for instance, while the 4:1 rail is utilized to provide power to other loads such as PCIe, FANs, and legacy systems, which are nearly always present on the board. The suggested dual-output IBC is a Hybrid Switched Capacitor converter (abbreviated as M-HSC), which is a fully-soft-switched resonant converter based on consolidated previous topologies. Experimental results for a 500 W, 1.17 kW/in ³ TDP discrete solution are included, showing the efficiency and power density of M-HSC.