GE Energy Delivers Industry-First 300W Eighth Brick Bus Converter

The new Barracuda series of fully regulated digital bus converters help power innovation in OEM new product designs, while reducing risks, accelerating time to market and lowering costs. The Barracuda series is a drop-in replacement for unregulated and semi-regulated bus converters challenged by recent industry-wide intellectual property issues. The standards-based DOSA footprints and analog/digital compatibility with existing circuit board designs shrinks the size, lowers the cost and improves the performance of DC-DC converter modules.

Designed for Intermediate Bus Architectures, the Barracuda eighth brick EBDW (digital) and EBVW (analog) 25 Amp modules offer a wide input voltage range of 36Vdc to 75Vdc with an energy efficiency rating of 95 percent that outperforms competitive offerings. The 58.4 mm x 22.8 mm x 11.3 mm compact form factor reduces circuit board real estate requirements. A wide operating temperature range of -40°C to +85°C is combined with an industry-standard PMBus interface for remote visibility and control. The new Barracuda module is priced to encourage rapid adoption in new and existing computing, networking, data storage and mobile internet infrastructure product designs, powering an array of point of load converters.

“The Barracuda series gives global OEMs the confidence to leverage the energy efficiency benefits of digital power control, with cost-effective, multi-sourcing options for supply chain efficiency,” said Jeff Schnitzer, president of GE Energy’s Power Electronics business. “The new software-based digital control technology developed for the Barracuda series will be utilized as part of future GE Energy power electronics solutions to dynamically optimize end-to-end energy efficiency from building to box to board.”

The Barracuda EBDW (digital) series incorporates digital communication, advanced synchronization features, load sharing, differential remote sense and output voltage trim. The Barracuda EBVW (analog) series is compatible with the DOSA standard 5-pin bus converter pin out. Protection features include overtemperature, output overcurrent and overvoltage combined with built-in filtering for both input and output voltage.

Available within 90 days worldwide, EBDW and EBVW Barracuda eighth brick module pricing starts at $41 per unit for OEM quantities.