Evaluation of Point of Load Converters for Space Computational Loads

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earth orbit (LEO) are becoming more ambitious and the power electronic systems for these missions are quickly becoming outdated when compared to the power-dense and highly efficient commercial solutions used to power modern processors.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.