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Achieving high efficiency and high power density features of intermediate bus converter (IBC) in data center application is very critical. This paper proposes a nonisolated switched-tank dc-dc converter (STC) to meet the high requirement of IBC. The proposed STC has fixed voltage conversion ratio. Theoretical analysis provides the guideline for designing resonant tank and nonresonant tank as well as selecting proper deadtime for the proposed circuit. With resonant operation feature of the proposed circuit, zero current switching is realized on all switching devices to help the high-efficiency operation of the proposed converter. Through the proposed design methodology in this paper, power loss on switching devices and planar inductors can be minimized. In addition, detailed power loss analysis and breakdown provide hints for further efficiency improvement. Simulation has been performed to validate the operating principle of the proposed STC. A designed 6x STC (450 W nominal/600 W maximum) based on eGaNFETs is demonstrated. With 54 V typical input voltage, the output of the 6x STC is 9 V. The GaN-based prototype achieves a peak efficiency of 98.55%. Also, it achieves 97.18% efficiency and 750 W/in 3 power density at 450 W.
Li et al. (2018) studied this question.