Sugar cube 100W power stage gets more efficient

Author: EIS Release Date: Dec 19, 2022

Flex Power Modules has upgraded the sugar-cube-size 80A BMR510 point-of-load converter power stage that it announced in February.

 

Flex Power Modules BMR510 two-phase regulator

“BMR510 now utilises advanced materials of magnetic core, yielding high inductance in a small package size, allowing lower switching frequency operation than would be necessary with the gapped ferrite cores previously used,” it explained. “This in turn reduces switching losses, improving efficiency by up to 1.5% to 90% compared with the original solution at 13.5V input, 0.8 V 40A output.”

 

There is only one model, the BMR510x034/002, which can convert 4.5 – 16V to 0.5 – 1.3V. It includes mosfets, drivers and inductors, but additional capacitance is needed. as well as an exetrnal PWM controller.

 

While tiny, at 10 x 9 x 7.6mm, the device can handle an eye-opening 104W (182W peak) and 140A peak.

 

Flex BMR510 dc-dc graphFlex’s BRM510 efficiency graph

What does the ‘excludes driver losses’ footnote mean?

“The BMR510 in essence is the power train consisting of two uncoupled, stand-alone phases that can operate in interleaved mode,” Flex marketing manager Phil Goff told Electronics Weekly. “In addition to the main input voltage, the units also require a separate supply voltage of 3.3V to power the driver and internal circuitry of the smart power stages. This rail consumes very little power and is ignored in the efficiency calculation, which is what the comment here refers to.”

 

It has a two-phase topology, accepts tri-state PWM inputs from the external controller, and has a separate enable input. “Output over-current and over-temperature protection are included, and sensed values are available for remote monitoring,” said Flex.

 

Optimised for top-side cooling (top image), terminations are BGA solder-bump, or optionally LGA. Thermal models are available.

 

Flex BRM510 dcdc app

 

Applications are foreseen powering GPUs, CPUs, FPGAs and asics (Eight phase application right).

 

Samples are available, and the upgraded BMR510 will be released for production “in Q4 2022”, said Flex.

 

The (currently limited) BMR510 product page can be found here. A data sheet is expected in the next couple of weeks, said Goff.