Until now, architecting and optimizing power chains has required a manual approach, with systems sketched out on paper or a whiteboard attached to the wall.
Until now, architecting and optimizing power chains has required a manual approach, with systems sketched out on paper or a whiteboard attached to the wall.
Today’s ASICs and processors typically operate on a low voltage and therefore require high current. This means that if they are placed at any distance from the power supply or DC-DC converter that feeds them, transmission losses can become an issue. Because of resistance and therefore voltage drop in the power path between the converter and load, the voltage across the load will be lower than that across the converter’s output terminals. The difference is given by I x R,
Many systems require battery banks to provide a backup should the main power source fail. At APEC 2014, Xiaoyan (Lucy) Yu presented a paper that she co-authored with Paul Yeaman describing a bi-directional converter suitable for such applications. A bi-directional topology simplifies the design of the power system that must charge the battery and also draw power from them when the main supply fails. The converter described was able to deliver excellent performance, supplying 300 W when charging the battery and 1500 W when supplying power to the DC bus. This was achieved with...
New solution eliminates need for intermediate 12 V stage The computing load now presented to data centers has become so intense that it has meant that the power schemes, architectures and component parts have been required to undergo a tremendous change. I recently interviewed Robert Gendron, Vice President of Vicor’s Picor division, about the company’s recent innovations that eliminate the need for intermediate voltage stages when converting from 48 V to the voltages required for modern processors. Space availability on the processor board, together with the urgent need to contain heat losses and spiraling...
Today we announced a solution for the Intel processor power standard VR12.5, which enables peak efficiency of 94% for Haswell-based x86 systems, even at low load, without the need for complex power management schemes
If you haven’t already visited it, the PowerBench section of the Vicor Website offers a wide range of online tools and reference material. Sean Crilly, VP VI Chip design engineering at Vicor, recently described how to use two of the latest of these, the Solution Selector and Whiteboard in his webinar Tools to Architect, Analyze and Optimize Power Chains. We have now made the slides from this webinar available to help you take advantage of these powerful tools. You can view the slides below, or visit the Vicor Slideshare channel to find even more...