Power supply is the basis of stable operations of all electronic products, especially those applications like data centers and communication infrastructure, etc. Numerous devices operate simultaneously in airtight machine rooms, which require a high quality power supply, creating the problem of reducing cooling effectiveness. Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) today expanded its suite of Power by Linear™ µModule® regulators with the LTM4700 step-down DC/DC power regulator, which combines the highest power in its class with the energy efficient performance needed to reduce data center infrastructure cooling requirements.
Energy-efficient high-power power module
When you enter a data center, you may be surprised by the spectacle of numerous electronic devices operating simultaneously on the rack. This kind of operation in an airtight machine room produces plenty of heat, which can cause device malfunction and service life shortening if it cannot be cooled down effectively. If you want to reduce the heat in the machine room, you can increase the operation of the air conditioner or you can effectively improve the power supply transformation efficiency to reduce the heat spread by the device, which is actually the basic solution to deal with the situation.
Efficient cooling is a key issue that influences global data centers. The increasing service demands for high throughput based on cloud computing has caused pressure on the current data center infrastructure, which needs to adopt a new heat dissipation method. Aiming at this requirement, ADI Company has launched the LTM4700 to solve this problem, which improves the density and performance of the data center's servers.
Being a dual 50A or single 100A step-down µModule (power module) DC/DC voltage regulator, the LTM4700 has remote configurability achieved by PMBus (a kind of open standard digital interface protocol based on I²C) and telemetry-monitoring function of power management parameters. The LTM4700 has been internally installed with a quick analog control loop, accurate mixed signal circuit, EEPROM, power MOSFET, inductors, and supporting components.
The LTM4700's two-wire serial interface enables time delay based on the programming slew rate and rank in order to implement output margin regulation and tuning, as well as ramp-up and down. Input and output current and voltage, output power, temperature, uptime and peak value are all readable with no need for customized configuration of the EEPROM memory contents. While start-up, the output voltage, switching frequency, and channel phase angle allocation can be set by utilizing a pin-strapping resistor. ADI Company provides an LTpowerPlay® GUI, DC1613 USB to PMBus converter, and demonstration kit for users to evaluate and test.
Depending on the LTM4700 step-down DC/DC power regulator, ADI Company enlarges its Power by Linear™ µModule voltage regulator series. The device has the maximum power and high energy efficiency used for reducing data center infrastructure cooling for similar products. This kind of new type of power supply µModule adopts an innovative packaging technique which achieves only a small influence on the system size and cooling cost under the conditions of increasing server density, and improving the throughput and computing power of the data center.
The LTM4700 µModule adopts 15mm x 22mm x 7.87mm BGA packaging. The high integration density and built-in component-on-package design provide onboard memory, a data conversion circuit, and digital interface, of which the size is equal to about half of competitive devices. This device provides SnPb or terminal finish according to RoHS standards, which can be widely applied in system optimization, characteristic analysis, and data mining of prototype design, production, and field environments. This also includes cloud computing, high speed computing, optical network systems, communication infrastructure and PCIe boards, as well as medical, industrial, test and measurement equipment, telecommunications, data communication and storage system.
Through adopting an innovative heatsink packaging technology, the LTM4700 has an operating temperature of 73℃, while that of competitors is usually 90℃ with their module solution. With an environment temperature up to 70℃ with 200 LFM air flow, the LTM4700 can provide 100A full-load current in 12VIN to 0.8VOUT conversion with a peak value conversion efficiency of 90%. In addition, the µModule architecture can help system designers combine 8 devices at most and provide a load current up to 800A to satisfy the high power demand of data center servers, including FPGA, ASIC, GPU and microcontrollers.
The LTM4700 can work in the input range from 4.5V to 16V, of which the output voltage can conduct digitally controlled in the range from 0.5V to 1.8V. An integrated A/D converters, D/A converters, and EEPROM enable users to adopt an I²C PMBus interface for conducting digitally monitor, record, and control for power parameters. The switching frequency can be synchronized to an external clock in the frequency range from 200kHz to 1MHz in order to satisfy applications that are sensitive to noise. The LTM4700 also has the functions of self-protection and load protection for fault conditions like over- and undervoltage, over-current, and over-temperature, etc.
The µModule voltage regulator launched by ADI solves the industry challenges related to professional knowledge limitation in the power supply design industry, PCB area reduction, thermal design constraints, and increasing pressure of product time-to-market. As a complete solution for component-in-package power management, the µModule voltage regulator is internally installed with an integrated DC/DC controller, power transistor, input and output capacitor, compensating components, and inductors in the compact surface mounting BGA or LGA package. The µModule power products support step-down (buck), step-down and step-up (buck-boost), battery chargers, isolation converter, LED drivers, and other functions. If you want to know more, please visit www.analog.com/LTM4700.
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