Rehan Tahir from Infineon recently filmed a video with us covering a cool demonstration that develops a thousand amps for a welder. The point was to highlight an Infineon 1 kA board that actually targets applications powering the GPUs and next-generation CPUs that will need a thousand amps or more. The demo uses Infineon power MOSFETS and Infineon multiphase solutions which includes controllers and power stages.
The actual circuitry involved is called a switched tank circuit. It works in two stages, the first with a 48-V input and an output at 12 V. The 12-V output feeds into the multiphase part of the circuit. A controller generates 16 phases to generate 1 kA total. In an actual application, the board would probably feed those 16 phases a GPU or a CPU.
The first stage using the STC topology hits around 97 or 98% efficiency, says Tahir. The second stage is close to 90%. And so for overall demo the figure is just under 90%. Infineon has also introduced an improved implementation called a ZVC STC, zero-voltage-switching switch capacitor converter. That improves the efficiency by another 1%.
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