Texas Instruments used the Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, California, to debut a new analog-to-digital converter for AI data centers and to demonstrate two other chips aimed at the power and timing problems that can knock those facilities offline.
Catching nanosecond glitches
The new converter, the ADC34DSO75, samples at 3 billion times per second. TI says it can keep watch on the high-current, low-voltage rails that feed servers around the clock at nanosecond resolution, catch brief power glitches as they happen and record them. The company says no earlier product offered this kind of fully remote, event-triggered monitoring, and that it is thousands of times quicker than tools in use today, so engineers would not need to debug on site with oscilloscopes. By TI's estimate, an hour of downtime can cost an operator several hundred thousand dollars.
Power and timing
The LMI800PS is what TI calls the industry's first 800-volt isolated hot-swap controller. It replaces a setup that needed five separate chips, and TI says integrating PMBus telemetry and an isolated bias supply cuts the board space required by more than 60%. It works with both plus-or-minus 400-volt and 800-volt power distribution and is designed so one failing load does not disrupt the shared power bus. TI says it meets safety standards with 5kVrms of reinforced isolation and over 8 millimeters of creepage.
The third device, the LMK6B, is an oscillator based on bulk acoustic wave technology, built for high-speed networking gear, where small timing errors can raise error rates as data rates climb.