Technical Features

May 2022
Combining GaN and Liquid Cooling for Greater Energy Efficiency in AI Data Centers

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

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
Date:
04/30/2024
Meeting Power Management Enhanced Efficiency, Reliability and Safety Requirements

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Figure 1. General Block Diagram of a Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS)

­Power conversion, isolation and accurate current measurement along with overvoltage/overcurrent circuit protection are necessary elements in a power supply design. Not only are these component solutions needed to help enhance reliability, but they are also required for regulatory compliance to help increase safe
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Date:
05/31/2022
Extending Laptop Battery Life in Real-World Usage Scenarios

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Laptop battery life in the real World

­Introduction Laptop battery life estimates advertised by OEMs are rarely accurate, but they are a major selling feature for a product. Laptops that can last an entire day of use (10+ hours) on a single charge often command two to three times the price of a laptop that has a run time of a few hours. A lot
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Date:
05/18/2022
Drive Your Power Applications to the Next Level with GaN

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Figure 1: The block diagram of the MDC901 GaN gate driver

­The entire ecosystem surrounding GaN HEMTs, which includes active and passive components like gate drivers, inductors and capacitors as well as the design techniques to implement the devices effectively, must quickly evolve to realize GaN’s full potential. As the device directly controlling the GaN HEMTs, th
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Date:
05/01/2022
Precision Ultra-Low-Power High-Side Current Sense

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Figure 1. Precision high-side current sense circuit based on the LTC2063 zero-drift amplifier

­Precision high-side measurement of microamp currents requires a small value sense resistor and a low offset voltage amplifier. The LTC2063 zero-drift amplifier has a maximum input offset voltage of just 5 µV and draws just 1.4 µA, making it a great choice for building a complete ultra low power, precision hi
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Date:
05/01/2022
A Look at the Advantages of 4th Generation SiC MOSFETs

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Figure 1: The evolution of process technologies improves upon the trench gate structure for a lowered on-resistance per unit area

­Power is arguably the most critical part of next-generation electric vehicles, alternative energy systems, and data centers, and industrial power supplies are increasingly reliant on efficient operations to save on energy costs and increase the effectiveness of their subsystems/equipment. In these applications, eve
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Date:
05/01/2022
Optimizing Data Center Intermediate Bus Voltage for Significant System Efficiency Improvements

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Figure 1: Data center energy use has stayed flat even with exponential traffic increase. Source: IEA

­While system designers have worked to get more data throughput without proportionally increasing power draw, there has been equal pressure to squeeze better efficiency out of the power delivery system, to reduce losses, consequent costs and cooling system overhead. Power converter designers have responded wi
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Date:
05/01/2022
Unlocking Super Compute Performance

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Figure 1. Power delivery and power efficiency has become the largest concern in large scale computing systems. The industry has witnessed a dramatic increase in power consumed by processors with the advent of ASICs and GPUs processing complex AI functions. Rack power has also subsequently increased with AI capability being utilized in large scale learning and inferencing application deployments. In most cases, power delivery is now the limiting factor in computing performance as new CPUs look to consume ever increasing currents. Power delivery entails not just the distribution of power but also the efficiency, size, cost and thermal performance

­The increasing complexity and variety of compute workloads demand immense processing capabilities. Whether used in a cloud data center or on-premise, a new breed of processors is able to increase throughput and reduce latency. However, processor advances are pushing power delivery boundaries. As a result, po
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Date:
05/01/2022
Ensuring Resilience Within Power Applications

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Figure 1: 1200A MPE HEMP Filter

­In recent years strengthened legislation, particularly in the USA and the EU, has seen power and utility companies having to consider electromagnetic interference (EMI) and electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threats within their sites. Legislation now dictates that the resilience of power systems against interruption or
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Date:
05/01/2022
Why Calculating Capacitor Lifetime Makes Sense

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Figure 1: An electrolytic capacitor essentially consists of an anode and cathode film, separator paper, and electrolytes

­Electrolytic and polymer hybrid capacitors have an almost identical design: they consist of a cathode side and an anode side, which in turn are both made of aluminum film. The film for the anode is subjected to an oxidation process, which creates an aluminum oxide layer forming the dielectric. Both films are ro
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Date:
05/01/2022
50 Shades of Green for Legacy Data Centers

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Figure 1. Intelligent Rack PDUs for Powering, Monitoring, and Managing Critical Infrastructure

­Several decades ago “green” meant only one thing in a data center, a business-related conversation, money! Increasing margins, lowering costs, improving the bottom line, achieving the ideal EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). These were the only shades of green discussed in
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Date:
05/01/2022
Direct Drive of SiC JFET – Extracting Maximum Performance

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Figure 1: Unipolar RDS∙A versus breakdown voltage data by technology (room temperature)

­The silicon carbide (SiC) JFET is arguably the most ideal switch technology for an application requiring minimum conduction loss, such as solid-state relay (SSR), solid-state circuit breaker (SSCB), and high power motor drive.  Its low on-resistance per unit area (RDS∙A) and fast switching compete well
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Date:
05/01/2022
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