The demands for isolated DC-DC converters are growing rapidly in recent years, including but not limited to computers, telecommunication, data centers,battery chargers, industrials, and aerospace applications.Collectively, these products consume more than 10% of the total electric power.One percent efficiency improvement in this industry sector represents tremendous energy saving.Moreover, with the increasing of cloud computing and big data, it is expected that data center alone will consume 10% of the total electricity by 2020.

Within the above mentioned industry sector, data center server power supplies are the most performance driven, energy and cost conscious. Within a data center, all major devices are powered from a 12V bus. This 12V bus architecture was developed in the early 90’s, when the power consumption was minuscule in comparison with today’s usage at 100A-200A levels per CPU. The i2R related copper loss for 12V bus is excessive.  To mitigate the copper loss in the power distribution, the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) recently undertook a project to develop a new industry standard for isolated DC/DC converters. This converter is used to step down 380V directly to 12V and placed directly on the motherboard. This architecture will eliminate the use of bulky cables and the losses associated with them. In order to place the high voltage DC-DC converter on the CPU board (mother board), this converter has to be very efficient and high-density to be compatible with core processors, memories, et al. Today, most 380V/12V isolated converter products are designed to operate at 50-100 kHz with a power density less than 7 W/cm3 and they are too bulky to be placed directly on the motherboard. It is not easy to achieve this tall order with current design practice using silicon devices. However, wide bandgap (WBG) power devices, such as GaN devices make it possible to design isolated DC-DC converter with much higher switching frequency, which can help dramatically reduce converter size while still achieving high efficiency.  The aforementioned iNEMI project indeed signifies a potential paradigm change in the design of isolated DC/DC converter for achieving high efficiency and high density at the same time.

The goal of IFEC 2017 is to develop a high-efficiency high-density isolated DC-DC converter.Competition teams are encouraged to  adopt WBG power devices in innovative circuit topologies to achieve higher efficiency and size reduction.Detailed specifications and requirements are listed in below.