The ever increasing need to exchange, compute, and store data has led to a large growth of hyperscale data center facilities around the world. Data centers consumption now accounts for 1%-2% of the global electricity and it is predicted to further significantly grow in the coming years, posing significant environmental and financial challenges. Two major challenges towards the sustainable development of data center infrastructures are the high energy loss in power conversion and the large size and cost of the current converter solutions.
Traditional power supplies are based on Si power devices, which have reached a performance bottleneck, preventing any major further improvement. Gallium Nitride power devices represent the perfect solution to address these challenges and replace the traditional silicon technology.
The great potential of GaN power devices is to increase the efficiency of power conversion while providing higher power density and reduced cost. Power units based on gallium nitride are more compact, allowing more data processors and storage to be added to the same rack and resulting in a larger data center capacity. In addition, GaN solutions also result in more efficient systems with estimations suggesting that GaN-based power devices can reduce energy costs by more than $100 million per year for large data center operators and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 1 million metric tons.
The Smart-GaNTM technology offered by NovaWave can significantly improve the efficiency and power density of the power supply system by combining the PFC of the totem column with the DC-DC structure, thus reducing the power supply size, energy consumption, and operating cost.