Enabling Future Innovations: Hybrid Converter for Quarter Brick Power Supply-Part 1: Benefits

In today’s world of digital information and constant social connection, having a well-designed and efficient data center is essential.

- Karl Audison Cabas

These data centers provide the networking, storage, and global connectivity we rely on. Keeping them running smoothly is crucial to avoid data interruptions and corruption. However, older data centers are struggling as they are operating near their limits with the market's increasing demand of computing power, and their usage is continuously increasing rapidly every year. For example, the use of artificial intelligence as a large language model in terms of weekly active users has doubled in less than a year. This has led to a growing need for higher power density, which in turn will need more robust and high-performance power converters.

As data centers scale up to support more powerful servers, networking equipment, and storage systems, they require higher power, which involves several stages of power conversion from the power transmission line down to the usable DC voltage level inside the rack. The legacy architecture in data centers is converting a rectified AC voltage down to 12 V DC, which will be the main power source inside the motherboards. However, 12 V DC architecture is becoming inefficient for main power delivery within the board. Increasing the input voltage to a 48 V supply allows for up to a 16x reduction in I2R losses across the PCB with considerably lower conversion losses and within the safety extra low voltage (SELV) level.

Therefore, an intermediate bus converter is a critical component in modern data center power architectures, which converts a 48 V voltage bus line from the primary power source, such as an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), to the existing intermediate bus voltage (5 V, 12 V architecture) and point-of-load (POL) regulators. This power supply is called an intermediate bus converter (IBC). IBCs come in various power capacities and sizes, with one common type being the quarter brick (QB) power supply.