Llew Vaughan-Edmunds from Navitas talks to PSD about the company’s new CRPS185 4.5kW power supply reference design for data center AI applications.
The biggest challenge for power designers at the moment is supplying energy to data centers. Operators are looking to put more processors on their PCBs, but keep the same space allocated for power. The new processors that are being installed are also much more power hungry than the ones that they are replacing. Today, Intel Xeon CPUs consuming 300W of power are being replaced by GPUs intended for AI applications, such as Nvidia’s ‘Grace Hopper’ H100 series, that can consume around 700W. In the not too distant future, Nvida Blackwell B100 and B200 series will be widely available, and they are expected to use around 1,000W. This means that the overall board-level power consumption is expected to rise from 3kW to over 10KW in the medium-term future.
Navitas used the recent PCIM exhibition to talk about how the company’s roadmap for datacenter solutions would reach that 10kW target, and also on its recently launched 3.2kW GaN-based reference design. Now, the next stage of that roadmap has been reached with the launch of a 4.5kW solution. The CRPS185 reference design combines the company’s GeneSiC Gen-3 ‘Fast’ (G3F) MOSFETs in an interleaved CCM totem-pole PFC, and its GaNSafe power IC devices in a full-bridge LLC topology to reach that 4.5kW figure. Overall, the reference design has a power density figure of 137 W/in3 at over 97% efficiency.
Llew Vaughan-Edmunds, Senior Director, Corporate Marketing & Product Management, at Navitas described the CRPS185 by saying, “The reference design is fully production capable and EMI tested. It is currently the highest density power supply for data centers at 137 W/in3, which is 40% better than anything else on the market. It is over 97% efficiency, and it passes all Titanium specifications. We achieve these figures by using SiC in the PFC front-end, and GaN on the LLC for the conversion. The GaNSafe devices have integrated short circuit protection in a four-pin package, so you can treat it like a discrete even though it's an IC. It just needs the gate, drain, source and temperature sense pins hooked up. People like it that way, because it doesn’t need any additional circuitry, it just works”.
For the LLC stage, the 650 V GaNSafe power ICs integrate power, protection, control, and drive in a TOLL power package. The power ICs offer extremely low switching losses, with a transient-voltage capability up to 800 V, and other high-speed advantages such as low gate charge (Qg), output capacitance (COSS), and no reverse-recovery loss (Qrr). The 650 V G3F SiC MOSFETs feature ‘trench-assisted planar’ technology to provide performance over temperature for the highest system efficiency and reliability in real-world applications.
