Dramatically reduce power loss & increase power density

Power delivery efficiency in data centre equipment is at an inflection point. As cloud service power levels increase to support higher-performance processor and memory requirements, data centre operators are striving for a PUE close to 1.00. With a PUE of 1.00, there would be no power loss, so 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 (48V-to-12V-to-Load) is a common architecture, its efficiency has peaked at about 90%.

Leveraging its expertise in power management, Maxim’s scalable, 48V solution breaks down the efficiency, density and transient performance barriers by using integrated power and magnetics. The 48V single conversion to the PoL (48V-to-Load) eliminates one conversion loss and reduces distribution power loss by a factor of 16 in a rack implementation, compared with 12V architectures.

Craig Teuscher, Vice President, Cloud and Data Center, Maxim Integrated, commented: “Maxim’s leadership in integrated power has enabled us to develop one of the first 48V single-stage solutions for powering CPUs, Memory, ASICs, GPUs and SoCs. Maxim has a high performance and flexible 48V integrated solution - consistent with what Google proposed this week at the Open Compute Project Summit - for hyperscale data centre customers to implement later this year.”