Application Stories
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Application Engineer
“The integrated active ORing controller and low on-state resistance MOSFET full-function solution is dramatically smaller and offers up to ten times lower power dissipation than a conventional TO-220, D2PAK diode ORing solution.”
David Berry
Phone:
   800-927-9474 (North America)
   00 800 8426 7000 (Europe)
   +852 2956-1782 (Asia)
Email: apps@vicorpower.com
Data Centers
Products Used
Cool-ORing™
Improved Efficiency and Fault Protection for the Data Center
 

Designers of power systems for data centers, or other equipment targeting 99.999 % system availability, are able to achieve very high system reliability by introducing redundancy and fault tolerance to the power architecture. In order to make the system fault tolerant, protection circuitry such as ORing and load disconnect functions needs to be added at each power node that could experience a fault. The use of ORing diodes ― which have a constant forward voltage drop ― introduces undesirable power losses and thermal management challenges. MOSFETs ― which have a much smaller internal resistance called RDS(on) ― have substantially lower conduction losses, and are generally much smaller size while reducing the need for excessive thermal management overhead.

When selecting fault protection solutions an engineer needs to consider the speed, efficiency, and size of the device as well as any thermal management considerations. Efficiency and thermal considerations become more critical if current levels are high.
In an application such as a data center, a power designer usually needs to be able to convert from a high voltage, beginning from a power-factor-corrected AC source, and down-convert in multiple stages, eventually getting down to 1.x volts at the load (for the processor). Picor ORing and load disconnect switch solutions can be deployed in the power system beginning at the 48 V conversion node, and then for any lower voltage node down to the 1.x V load.

Picor Cool-ORing™ and Cool-Switch™ solutions are available as both discrete high-speed controller ICs and as full-function active ORing solutions. Full-function solutions combine the high-speed controller with low on-state resistance MOSFETs in very high-density 5 mm x 7 mm or 7 mm x 8mm thermally enhanced LGA packages. Both solutions offer very fast dynamic response, typically within 160 ns to a system level power source fault condition. The full function solutions are extremely small, high density, and provide very low power dissipation with typical on-state resistances between 1.5 mΩ and 8.5 mΩ.