A Two-Stage 110VAC-to-1VDC Power Delivery Architecture Using Hybrid Converters for Data Centers and Telecommunication Systems

Improving power delivery and management plays a key role in minimizing the cost of building and operating future green data centers to meet the fast growth of high-performance computing. Toward this important goal, this paper presents a new complete power delivery architecture to bridge AC grid voltages to core levels for computing loads using only 2 conversion stages with new converter topologies. The first stage converts a commercial AC line voltage of 90V-110V to a 48-60V intermediate bus with power factor correction (PFC). The second stage converts the bus voltage to core voltages of ~1 V with high current density and simple duty cycle control. Individually, the first stage was measured at 96.1% peak efficiency for output currents ranging in 0-4.5 A, while the second stage achieved 90.7% peak efficiency with a load range of 0-220 A at 1 V. Measured peak power densities are 73 W/in3 for the first stage and 2020 W/in3 for the second stage. In combination, the direct conversion from a line AC voltage of ~110 VAC to 1 VDC achieves a peak efficiency of 84.1% while providing output currents up to 160A.