Navitas’ GaN and SiC technologies have been selected to support Nvidia’s 800 V HVDC data center power infrastructure to support 1 MW IT racks and beyond.

Navitas Semiconductor (Nasdaq: NVTS), the industry leader in next-generation GaNFast™ gallium nitride (GaN) and GeneSiC™ silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductors, today announced a collaboration with NVIDIA(Nasdaq: NVDA)on their next-generation 800 V HVDC architecture to support‘Kyber’ rack-scale systems powering their GPUs, such as Rubin Ultra, enabled by GaNFast™ and GeneSiC™power technologies.

NVIDIA’s next generation of 800V DC architecture aims to establish high-efficiency, scalable power delivery for next-generation AI workloads, to ensure greater reliability, efficiency, and reduced infrastructure complexity.

Today’s existing data center architecture uses traditional 54 V in-rack power distribution and is limited toa few hundred kilowatts (kW). Bulky copper busbars are required to transfer this low-voltage electricity from the rack-mounted power shelves to the compute trays. As power increases above 200 kW, this architecture runs into physical limits due to power density, copper requirements, and reduced system efficiency.

Modern AI data centers require gigawatts (GW) of power for the increasing demand for AI computation. Nvidia’s approach is to directly convert the 13.8 kV AC grid power to 800 V HVDC at the data center perimeter usingsolid state transformers (SST) and industrial-grade rectifiers, eliminating several AC/DC and DC/DC conversion steps, maximizing efficiency and reliability.

Due to the higher voltage level of 800 V HVDC, the thickness of copper wires can be reduced by up to 45%,due to I2R losses, where the same amount of power can be delivered with increased voltage and lower current. Using a traditional 54V DC system, over 200kg of copper would be needed to power a 1MW rack, which is not sustainable for next-generation AI datacenters with GWpower demand.

The 800V HVDC directlypowers the IT racks(eliminating the need for additional AC-DC converters) andis converted by DC-DC converters to lower voltages, which will drive GPUs, such as theRubin Ultra.

Navitas is an established leader in AI data center solutions enabled by GaN and SiC technology. The high-power GaNSafe™ power ICsintegrate control, drive, sensing, and critical protection features, enabling unprecedented reliability and robustness. GaNSafe is the world’s safest GaN with short-circuit protection (350ns max latency), 2kV ESD protection on all pins, elimination of negative gate drive, and programmable slew rate control. All these features are controlled with 4-pins, allowing the package to be treated like a discrete GaN FET, requiring no VCC pin.

Additionally, Navitas offersa family of medium voltage (80-120V) GaN devices, which have been optimized for secondary side DC-DC conversion,delivering high-speed, high efficiency,and small footprint, for AI data centers PSUs with outputs of 48V-54V.

Enabled by 20 years of SiC innovation leadership, GeneSiC proprietary ‘trench-assisted planar’ technology provides world-leading performance over temperature, delivering high-speed, cool-running operation for high-power, high-reliability applications. G3F SiC MOSFETs deliver high-efficiency with high-speed performance, enabling up to 25°C lower case temperature, and up to 3x longer life than SiC products from other vendors.

Offering the industry’s broadest voltage range – stretching from 650 Vto ultra-high voltages of 2.3 kV to 6.5 kV, the SiC technology has been implemented in multiple projects for MW energy storage and grid-tied inverters with the Department of Energy (DoE).

Fig. 1. Navitas GaN and SiC technologies cover the complete power delivery from grid to the GPU.