Computer Power Supply Design

All modern computers rely on switch-mode power converters for their dc supply needs. These power electronic supplies range from battery management converters for laptops to multiple redundant converters for advanced server clusters.

Many of today's advances involve distributed power methods. A distributed-architecture power supply for a computer system consists of an off-line active power factor correction (PFC) circuit followed by a dc-dc converter and multiple point-of-load dc-dc converters. Such a arrangement differs from the conventional bulk power converter architecture since it includes an extra power conversion stage, and because it uses an intermediate dc level for distribution. In the near future, we can expect computer designers to use 12 V buses and even 48 V buses to deliver power to individual boards and subsystems..

Power electronics is answering a new challenge for the development of extremely dynamic, low-voltage applications such as high performance microprocessor computer systems. These devices demand tight regulation of extremely low voltage outputs (now reaching below 2 V) as well as very fast response to large load transitions. Applications such as this which demand high power density, low power consumption, high efficiency, and innovative packaging are inspiring new technologies including synchronous rectification, polyphase interleaving, on-board power conversion, GaAs semiconductor devices, and board-level interconnect modeling. In the next few years, we will begin to see a further advance to chip-level interconnects and power conversion.

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