Composite Modular Power Delivery Architecture for Next-Gen 48V Data Center Applications

• Published in: 2018 1st Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications in Asia (WiPDA Asia) pp. 343 - 350
• Main Authors: Lyu, Xiaofeng, Li, Yanchao, Ni, Ze, Johnson, Jalen, Cao, Dong, Nan, Chenhao, Jiang, Shuai
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2018
• Subjects: Capacitors; composite; Data centers; DC-DC; DC-DC power converters; GaN; Inductors; modular; Regulators; Stress; Switches; ZCS
• DOI: 10.1109/WiPDAAsia.2018.8734572

This paper presents a smart Composite Modular Power Delivery Architecture (COMPDA). One example for this architecture is applied in DC-DC 48V to 12V data center circuit shown here. COMPDA has many good features, such as voltage clamping for all devices, low total device stress under wide range ratio. It also has good modular characteristics. Each device has the same voltage and current stress. The principle operation is that all modular cells are connected in-series to share input high voltage and in-parallel to pump output high current, which can easily achieve ultra-high power density and high efficiency. Zero current switching (ZCS) can be applied in the proposed converter. A 4X unregulated DC-DC COMPDA with ZCS is studied for data center application. Finally, a GaN based prototype is built and tested to verify the theoretical analysis. The proposed converter can achieve the peak efficiency at 98.55% under ultra-high switching frequency 253 kHz. Furthermore, another GaN based high-density 6X boost COMPDA based prototype is also presented here. The peak efficiency can achieve 98.9% at 4kW power rating.