Dynamic Two Stage Bus Architecture

In a green world, power consumption by electronics, amongst myriad of other things, must be and is being optimized to allow for minimum power consumption for the best set of features and performance. A quick look at the power conversion efficiencies of DC\DC converters reveals that it has been steadily climbing and in some cases can reach the mid 90%. The challenges of converting medium dc voltage 36V- 48V to low DC voltages in a single stage are several and consistently leads to higher power losses that leads to lower efficiency and higher thermal load on the final application. Typically these higher voltages are first converted down to 5V or 12V rails which are then converted further down to 0.6V to 3.3V for CPU, DDR etc. rails. With the present focus on high efficiency over the entire range of the load current in multi-rail systems, these intermediate voltages (5V/12V) may not be optimum for all load currents. This challenge may lead to more complex and larger implementation of the power section. In today's market where all new applications must be more powerful, smaller size, lighter weight and less expensive than the competition, a new solution is needed Exar has developed a new IC that enables a Two Stage Bus Architecture that will facilitate achieving high efficiency in the challenging situations where we are converting high DC voltage into a low DC voltage at high load currents.