Analyzing and determining optimum on-board power architectures for 48 V-input systems

The use of an intermediate bus (12 V or other) followed by nonisolated converters, has recently become a popular topic with architects of board-mount power, particularly in communications applications. This paper explores various onboard power architectures, their trade-offs in size, efficiency and cost, and provides a method that enables determining the optimum architecture to use in a particular application.