Space experiments in low earth orbit (LEO) are becoming more ambitious and the power electronic systems for these missions are quickly becoming outdated when compared to the power-dense and highly efficient commercial solutions used to power modern processors. In this work, a comparison is presented between several radiation-hardened (rad-hard) and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) point-of-load (PoL) converters with a focus on Gallium Nitride (GaN) switching FETS. The converters were designed and evaluated based on their electrical and thermal performance when supplying power to computational loads in a LEO environment. This work is presented in the context of supplying power to a 1U FPGA-based computing platform that features a mix of COTS and rad-hard components, and a modular power system.
Evaluation of Point of Load Converters for Space Computational Loads
2020-03-01
2126053 byte
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
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