Maxim Integrated 48 V single-stage to PoL conversion

As cloud service power levels increase to support higher-performance processor and memory requirements, data centre operators are striving for a power usage effectiveness (PUE) close to 1.00. With a PUE of 1.00, all the energy would be used for processing data.

With the most efficient data centres topping out at a PUE of 1.1, the next level of IT infrastructure optimisation is to reduce conversion stages and its associated losses. While today’s two-stage power conversion (48 V to 12 V to load) is a common architecture, its efficiency has peaked at about 90%.

The 48 V point-of-load (PoL) single-stage DC/DC regulator from Maxim Integrated breaks down efficiency, density and transient performance barriers by using integrated power and magnetics. The 48 V single conversion to the PoL (48 V to load) eliminates one conversion loss and reduces distribution power loss by a factor of 16 in a rack implementation, compared with 12 V architectures.

Benefits of the product include: low PUE due to high conversion and distribution efficiency; good power density due to single-stage architecture; good transient performance due to integrated power and magnetics; and flexibility due to scalable architecture for power and efficiency.