TEJA GOLLA
DATA CENTER

AUTOMOTIVE

Background and Motivation
The growth of data centers, automobiles, and smartphone applications has increased significantly in recent years. With the growing demand, opportunities, rising investment, and increasing annual production, the automobile industry is a growth engine for India’s economy. In the data center applications, 48V DC is generated from the AC grid using a rectifier and is then stepped down to a 12V DC using Intermediate Bus Converter (IBC). Multiphase buck converters are a popular choice to step down this 12V to 0.8-3.3V and supply high dynamic currents to the ASICs, processors, and I/O devices due to the technical benefits they offer. In the case of automotive applications, the entire architecture is similar to that of data centre except that 48V is generated from a battery and is then stepped down to 5V using front-end regulators, which is then stepped down to 0.8V-3.3V using multiphase buck to meet the current requirements of the power-hungry application processor. In the case of smartphones, 3.8V battery voltage is directly stepped down to 0.9V using multiphase buck converter without any intermediate bus converter (IBC)