Buck converter pair have GE’s smallest footprint yet
Voltage regulators in 61mm2 packages have been announced by GE. The FKX003 and FKX006 DLynx II buck converters offer the company’s smallest PoL footprint to date and are available in either 3.0 or 6.0A modules. These two additions to the DLynx II product family mean it can now be used to power customer applications with loads from three to 170A.
The integrated PoL power modules convert five or 12V bus voltages to lower voltages of 0.6 to 5.5V, as required by the load. The 6.76 x 9.0mm DLynx II PoL modules provide the same benefits as GE’s previous analogue, low-current DLynx 3.0 and 6.0A DC/DC, non-isolated converters, but in a 58 per cent smaller package while offering 2.4 times the current density and without compromising the reliability and performance of the Lynx/TLynx/DLynx series, says GE.
“As power supply customers continue to look for higher-efficiency switching voltage regulators to help minimize current consumption, factors such as speed, reduced risk and ease of use have become critical,” said Vesa Jokitulppo, senior product manager, GE’s Industrial Solutions. “Many other solutions available in the market require additional external elements such as inductors, more output capacitance or components required to supply an external bias voltage. GE’s new Femto DLynx II buck converters are complete, fully electrically characterised, easy-to-use PoL modules. Their small footprint helps save board space for value-added features, and using fully characterised and agency-tested modules enables faster time to market and lower application development risk,” he added.
FKX006 is one of the smallest complete buck converter modules at only 10A per square cm. With the same footprint, the FKX003 provides design flexibility allowing designers to provide 3.0A or 6.0A. The converters also have wide input and output voltage ranges (4.5 to 14.4V and 0.6 to 5.5V respectively) and high efficiencies of up to 93.5 per cent. The FKX003 and FKX006 support patented Tunable Loop, which provides superior transient performance while minimising required output capacitors, according to GE.
FKX buck converters can be used to power any component with an operating voltage of 0.6 to 5.5V, particularly where board space is limited or where low-risk design is required, such as industrial portable and handheld devices (e.g. barcode readers), industrial automation, test and measurement, telecomms and wireless infrastructure equipment, wireless basestations, enterprise switching and storage applications, servers and storage, routers and switches, adapter cards, PCI Express cards and PCI cards, embedded computing, high-performance computing and supercomputers, FPGA, ASIC, DSP and SoC power designs and any space-constrained applications that require high power density.
