

MIT Startup Aims to Make Data Centers Efficient with Power Conversion Tech - sliggity
http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/29/mit-startup-aims-to-drastically-improve-the-energy-efficiencies-of-big-data-centers/

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aidenn0
I'd like some more details; they must be doing something very novel if they
are eliminating the inductor. If you just build a traditional switching
converter with a capacitor instead of an inductor, you end up with less than
50% efficiency.

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Daniel_Newby
Their apparent patent: <http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=_wPKAAAAEBAJ>

It appears to be a switched capacitor front end for a conventional inductor-
based converter. The special sauce appears to be that the design requirements
for the back end converter are relaxed if its voltage varies over a smaller
range.

Efficiency can be much higher than 50% if the capacitors are only lightly
discharged during a cycle. However under high load that means fast switching,
which means high capacitive losses in the switch transistors. A hybrid
approach might be a big win for small systems (cell phones) that spend most of
their time asleep, and it could save cost and circuit board area over a
complicated SEPIC converter.

Their elevator pitch: <http://www.thebusinessmakers.com/index.php?id=2761>

Ouch. Data centers are _not_ small systems that spend most of their time
asleep. My gut feel is that even the static current draw from a big CPU and
its DRAMs is well outside the sweet spot of this technology.

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kwantam
This article is really light on detail. A quick search of DSpace, MIT's
paper/thesis repository, brings up the following paper from Giuliano in 2009:

"Fully monolithic cellular buck converter design for 3-D power delivery"
<http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/61350>

It's not clear that it's what they're trying to productize, but it's likely at
least related.

