A Quasi Output Voltage Regulation Technique for the Zero InductorVoltage Converter

The demand for internet and computing resources has led to datacenters and servers being one of the fastest growing consumers of power in the world today. While datacenter power architectures have improved over time, the majority of the loss still occurs at the server power supply, and board level voltage regulators. To attempt to improve this, Google has proposed and implemented a 48 volt server architecture that can significantly reduce both the upstream conversion losses, and the distribution losses within the server racks. To fully realize these benefits new technology is needed to convert 48 volts down to the point of load voltage levels. In this paper a regulation technique for the zero inductor-voltage converter is proposed. This modified control scheme allowed the ZIV converter topology to provide a regulated 12V output from 48/60V input range without sacrificing many of the key advantages that allow the ZIV converter to achieve the highest demonstrated power density and efficiency for intermediate bus converter technologies.