Building on the four initial standards it published in November 2014, the Architects of Modern Power (AMP Group) consortium has announced a further standard aimed at establishing common mechanical and electrical specifications for the development of advanced power conversion technology for distributed power systems. The ‘teraAMP’ standard, designed for non-isolated digital point-of-load (POL) dc-dc converters, will extend the current range from 90 to 120 A while supporting both vertical and horizontal mechanical configurations.
The new ‘teraAMP’ standard adds to the previous ‘microAMP’ and ‘megaAMP’ standards for digital POLs that covered 20 to 25 A and 40 to 50 A designs respectively. All these allow for both horizontal and vertical configurations. The first products meeting this new ‘teraAMP’ standard are due to be introduced by AMP Group members at next month’s APEC 2015 Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (Charlotte, NC from March 15th – 19th).
“The teraAMP standard is the next step in high density, high complexity power design support,” commented Mark Adams, AMP Group spokesperson. “As chip architectures continue to reduce and on-board power requirements increase, it is imperative that the power industry keeps pace by providing high current density solutions at the point of load,” Adams concluded.
The formation of the AMP Group, announced in October 2014, recognised a need for true multi-sourced but technically advanced and highly efficient power supplies for distributed power architectures. Initially this requirement was driven by telecom and datacom companies but is now proliferating into other industries. Previous attempts to standardise power supplies typically only addressed the mechanical aspects of their design, i.e. the physical dimensions and pin locations. What the AMP Group has done is to extend its standardisation to embrace electrical specifications and performance, including the monitoring, control and communications functions made possible by the adoption of digital controllers. This allows AMP to define common configuration files to enable plug-and-play interoperability between products from its member firms, which currently comprise CUI, Ericsson Power Modules and Murata.
Alongside the digital POL standards, AMP has also defined two standards for advanced bus dc-dc converters: the ‘ABC-ebAMP’ standard relates to advanced bus bricks measuring 58.42 x 22.66 mm and ranging from 264 to 300 W, while the ‘ABC-qbAMP’ standard covers quarter-brick supplies, measuring 58.42 x 36.83 mm and ranging from 420 to 468 W. These standards detail mechanical footprints, features, and configuration files.
