Power delivery efficiency in data center equipment is at an inflection point. As cloud service power levels increase to support higher-performance processor and memory requirements, data center operators are striving for a PUE close to 1.00. With a PUE of 1.00, there would be no power loss, so all the energy would be used for processing data.

With the most efficient data centers topping out at a PUE of 1.1, the next level of IT infrastructure optimization is to reduce conversion stages and its associated losses. While today's two-stage power conversion (48V-to-12V-to-Load) is a common architecture, its efficiency has peaked at about 90%.

Leveraging its expertise in power management, Maxim's scalable, 48V solution breaks down the efficiency, density, and transient performance barriers by using integrated power and magnetics. The 48V single conversion to the PoL (48V-to-Load) eliminates one conversion loss and reduces distribution power loss by a factor of 16 in a rack implementation, compared with 12V architectures.