Technical Features

March 2022

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Figure 1: Projected electricity consumption of data centers (2015 – 2030) [6]

Combining GaN and Liquid Cooling for Greater Energy Efficiency in AI Data Centers

By: Paul Wiener, Vice President Strategic Marketing, Julian Styles, Director Application Business Development Both at Infineon Technologies

The data center industry is at a crossroads, facing unprecedented transformation due to the surge in generative AI and other emerging technologies. This surge has massively increased the power consumption on servers, putting a strain on data centers around the world. Data centers already account for about 2 perce

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Date:

04/30/2024

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Figure 1: Power supplies used in semiconductor fab equipment are essential for every task at the front and back end of the process, with power density and the ability to be as close to the tool as possible being especially critical in next-gen fabs

Silicon Carbide Makes for Smarter Semi Fab/Process Power Supplies

Adam Anders, Power Platforms Manager at Wolfspeed & Chris Hewitt, Research and Development Manager, HPBU at Astrodyne TDI

Semiconductor device fabrication processes have several distinct and intricate steps. Power supplies used in semiconductor fab equipment are essential for every task at the front and back end of the process. Due to its power density, reliability, and design flexibility, engineers are seeing the benefits of using

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Date:

03/15/2022

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Active Front End Rectifier

Jonathan Dodge, P.E., UnitedSiC

1: Introduction Battery chargers for electric vehicles require galvanic isolation between the grid connection and the batteries. Therefore, an EV charger almost always has two stages: a high power-quality rectifier that converts AC to DC, followed by a DC-DC converter utilizing a high-frequency transformer

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Date:

03/15/2022

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Figure 1: Experienced power designers have crossed that technological chasm many times, with the latest one being the migration from analog control to digital (Source: PRBX)

Closing the Gap on Wide Band Gap Semiconductors?

Patrick Le Fèvre, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Powerbox

For a power designer, any new technology that makes it possible to improve performance whilst simultaneously making products smaller and more energy efficient is a very exciting concept. Over the last century the world of power electronics has witnessed many innovations, with the latest major one being the move fr

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: A passive primary clamp RCD solution (highlighted) is highly dissipative and limits the efficiency and operating frequency of flyback power supplies

Enabling Super-Dense Flyback Power Supplies

Roland Saint Pierre, Director of New Product Definition, Power Integrations

Off-line flyback power supplies require a clamp circuit (sometimes called a snubber) on the primary side of the transformer to limit the drain-source voltage stress on the power MOSFET when this switch turns off during normal operation. There are several approaches to designing these clamp circuits. Low-cost pa

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: Pricing comparison between eGaN FETs and MOSFETs. Prices were for 1,000 pieces in February 2022

Roadblocks to GaN Adoption in Power Systems

Alex Lidow, CEO and Co-founder, Efficient Power Conversion

In many applications, such as lidar and space electronics, adoption of GaN has been extremely rapid. Lidar flourished as a result of the extremely high speed of GaN devices, which is more than 10 times faster than the aging silicon MOSFET. Space electronics has rapidly accepted GaN-on-Si power transistors du

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: Test set up for VR stability evaluation

Evaluating Voltage Regulator Stability Using Step Load Testing

Masashi Nogawa, Staff Systems Engineer, Qorvo

Engineers are busy replacing and updating their aged PC boards that use traditional transistors, typically super-junction silicon MOSFETs and Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs). One hot area in this upgrading process is power supplies for pulse-load applications, such as laser pulse drivers, light bea

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1. GaN transistors enable more efficient, cooler-running, compact, and cost-efficient designs

Approaches for Driving GaN Devices and Simplifying Gate Drive Design

Lucas Lu, GaN Systems

GaN offers low RDSon/VDSon, high electron mobility, and other characteristics that result in more efficient designs. Higher switching frequencies allow designers to make tradeoffs between efficiency and switching speed for application-optimized designs. These characteristics enable more efficient solutions, run

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: Early datacenters used distributed AC for each shelf in a rack

Using Distributed 48 V Instead of 12 V in Datacenters

Gary Edmonds, Director of System Engineering, Flex Power Modules

The measure of datacenter energy efficiency is ‘Power Usage Effectiveness’ or PUE, and the best ‘hyperscale’ installations achieve a figure of about 1.1, or 100 W lost in cooling, distribution and power conversion for every kW used by the IT equipment. As best practices trickle down to smaller datacenters, th

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: The functional block diagram of the TPSM8282xA buck converter range (source TI)

Investigating Power Delivery For Complex Processing

Mark Patrick, Mouser Electronics

Processors are increasingly highly integrated devices. Squeezing more functionality into a single package offers optimal PCB space use, optimises BOM cost, and eases power management challenges. This approach is good news for many applications, from inference at the edge, compute-intensive search acceleration and ind

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: PFC topologies: dual-boost PFC (a) and boost PFC (b)

Why GaN Enables High Efficiency in Totem-Pole PFC-Based Power Designs

Charlie Munoz, GaN Product Marketing Engineer, Texas Instruments

Almost all of the popular modern-day trends involve an AC/DC power supply, which takes energy from the AC grid and delivers it to the electrical equipment as a well-regulated DC. With the increasing power consumption in these systems, the associated energy losses in the AC/DC power conversion process becomes a si

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1. Longtime Eaton investments in onsite clean energy systems help reduce carbon emissions and energy costs, including this solar PV system at the company’s building outside of Cleveland. Image courtesy of Eaton. Photography: © David Sundberg/Esto

Safely Connect Solar PV to Electrical Systems

Lawrence T. Conner, energy transition senior application specialist, Eaton, and Jaska Tarkka, energy transition application engineer, Eaton

The fact that we’ll fill so much of our future energy needs with solar doesn’t come as a surprise. Businesses and communities have been steadily striving to become self-sufficient power producers that can generate, store, consume and even sell excess renewable energy back to their utility. Knowing what it t

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Date:

03/01/2022

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Figure 1: OBC design presents a number of challenges to power designers

Device Packaging is the Key to Effective Thermal Management

By: Daniel Makus, Global Application Manager xEV and EV Charging and Severin Kampl, Senior Application Engineer for High-Voltage Power Conversion, both at Infineon Technologies AG

Within the automotive industry, development and innovation continue at a rapid pace in almost all aspects of vehicle design, from the chassis to the powertrain, infotainment, connectivity, and automation. However, with the time taken to recharge electric vehicles (EVs) – especially in-journey – being cited

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Date:

03/01/2022