Increasing Hyperscale Data Center Efficiency: A Better Way to Manage 54-V\/48-V-to-Point-of-Load Direct Conversion
Paolo Levi Sandri · IEEE Power Electronics Magazine · 2017
The hyperspeed growth of data center power demand starts with the high power consumption required by the current and upcoming generations of digital application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs)-central processing unit (CPU), double data rate memories (DDR) and networking ASICs-in addition to the exploding use of high-power graphics processing units (GPUs) for artificial intelligence and machine-learning functions. Hyperscale data centers will also increase in number, from 259 at the end of 2015 to 485 by 2020. They will represent 47% of all installed data center servers by 2020. An important parameter for data center buildings is the power utilization efficiency (PUE), which indicates the ratio between the total power consumed by the datacenter divided by the useful (server) power. The ideal PUE is one, meaning that all of the data center power is used for information technology (IT). To implement more efficient power conversion systems for data center building blocks such as CPU- and GPU-based servers, networking, and storage, STMicroelectronics (ST) offers an innovative and unique solution to effectively replace the conventional conversion from the 12-V dc bus with direct conversion from the 48-V dc bus (or 54 V, as more commonly used in data centers). The transition from 12 V to 48 V provides several benefits in overall rack efficiency gain and a simpler battery backup system (BBS), leading to an optimized use of rack space. This new solution was developed by leveraging ST's consolidated experience in digital power conversion, including unique intellectual properties specifically developed to address the key challenges.