New Industry Products

IR Introduces Gen2 SupIRBuck™ Integrated Voltage Regulators

February 16, 2009 by Jeff Shepard

International Rectifier, (IR)® has introduced its second generation (Gen2) of SupIRBuck integrated point-of-load (POL) voltage regulators for energy-efficient high performance server, storage and netcom applications.

The highly versatile Gen2 SupIRBuck family features IR’s latest advances in control IC, MOSFET and package integration technologies to deliver 4, 8, and 12A output current with benchmark efficiency over the entire load range. While optimized for 12V input voltage, superior efficiencies are also achieved in applications with 9.6, 5 or 3.3V input voltages.

The new devices offer a high switching frequency up to 1.5MHz to allow the use of smaller inductors and fewer output capacitors. Tailored for data center applications, the Gen2 SupIRBuck devices provide an extensive range of features that are said to significantly reduce overall system complexity and size. According to IR, SupIRBuck’s excellent efficiency and thermal properties deliver full current rating with no air flow and without heat-sink, and allow back-side mounting on a motherboard to provide additional space savings.

"IR7’s Gen2 SupIRBuck family delivers benchmark peak efficiencies higher than 96% for greater energy savings and system reliability, and a very high switching frequency for significant overall system size reduction. Moreover, the devices’ common scalable footprint offer a high level of flexibility to adapt to changing output current requirements, providing designers with an easy to implement, low risk solution optimized for space constrained high performance applications." said Cecilia Contenti IR’s POL Products Marketing Manager.

Goran Stojcic, Executive Director for IR’s POL Products added, "IR’s Gen2 SupIRBuck family further expands IR’s rich portfolio of POL products and builds on the success of the Gen1 family released in December 2007. With the Gen2 family we have responded to our customers’ needs and delivered on our roadmap promise of enabling greater energy efficiency while significantly reducing the overall solution size."

With a common 5 x 6mm footprint, the Gen2 SupIRBuck family of integrated voltage regulators is designed for 4, 8 and 12A of output load current at 1.5MHz switching frequency and provides wide input voltage range of 1.5 to 16V with 5V bias, and wide output voltage range of 0.7V to 90% Vin. Unlike other integrated solutions, SupIRBuck presents a pin compatible solution for easy current upgrade. Other key features include over current and over temperature protection, programmable switching frequency, enable input with input voltage monitoring capability, hiccup current limit, soft-start, power good output, advanced pre-bias start-up, 1% accurate 0.7V reference voltage, sequencing, and a dedicated device for DDR memory tracking.

Pricing for the IR3842 device begins at US $1.20 each in 10,000-unit quantities. Pricing for the IR3831 and IR3841 devices begin at US $1.30 each in 10,000-unit quantities while the IR3840 devices begins at US $1.75 each in 10,000-unit quantities. Production orders are available immediately. The devices are lead-free, halogen-free and RoHS compliant.