High-Current Inductors for Low-Voltage Multi-Phase Power Applications

Pulse Electronics, a YAGEO Company is expanding its portfolio of high-current, low DCR inductors used in single-phase PoL and multi-phase buck converters to power processors, memory modules, FPGAs and ASICS in servers, data centers, networking systems, and graphics cards. The five families provide lower core loss using the latest high-frequency materials, reduced DCR, and higher current ratings in standard footprints. These multi-phase buck topologies distribute the current among multiple parallel ‘paths’ with staggered turn-off and turn-on. By operating each phase in a staggered fashion, the ripple currents in each phase tend to cancel at the output and the overall ripple current seen at the load is much smaller than the ripple on each phase. This approach allows smaller inductances to be used (typically on the order of 50 nH to 300 nH) and can allow design engineers a trade-off between how quickly the converter responds to a change in the load current (transient response) versus stability of the control loop.