Infineon Puts a 500 kHz Control Loop in a Data Center Power MCU, But Discloses No Price or Sampling Date

Data Centers News Power Electronics Product
Marin Holt
October 3, 2026
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195
7 minutes read

Control-loop frequency: 500 kHz
Peak switching frequency: 2 MHz
Accelerator cores: 200 MHz dual Cortex-M33
Prior Main Line ceiling: 300 kHz

Infineon released a microcontroller on September 22 that closes a power-conversion control loop 500,000 times a second. The part is the PSOC Control C3 Performance Line. The Munich chipmaker is aiming it at AI server power supplies, solar inverters and EV charging, where gallium nitride switches have outrun the processors meant to steer them. Infineon puts the power-conversion slice of that microcontroller market at 0.4 billion euros now and 0.7 billion by 2030. It named no price for the part. It named no sampling date either.

The headline number is the switching frequency ceiling: 2 MHz. The existing C3 Main Line tops out between 200 and 300 kHz, so the Performance Line is roughly a sevenfold jump at the top end. The control loop itself runs at 500 kHz. At the 2 MHz ceiling that works out to one loop update every four switching cycles. Texas Instruments sits in the same socket. It pairs its C2000 real-time microcontrollers with gallium nitride devices for data center power supply units, a combination TI says can reach up to 99.2 percent efficiency.

The mechanism is a block Infineon calls the performance power control accelerator. Inside it sit two more Arm Cortex-M33 cores at 200 MHz each, an analog-to-digital converter, comparators and a 3P3Z filter. The main core is a single Cortex-M33 running at up to 180 MHz. Marijana Vukicevic, business development and marketing director for data center power at Infineon, told Power Electronics News that the accelerator cores and the analog sub-circuits share a single communication line, which is what lets the loop close quickly. Pin count rises from 80 on the Main Line to 100 here.

Infineon also put post-quantum cryptography on the die, sized against the CNSA Suite 2.0 requirement, alongside PSA Level 3 enablement and DICE-ready certification. Steve Tateosian, senior vice president and general manager for IoT, consumer and industrial MCUs, said the family is built for digital control applications that need higher switching frequencies while holding precision, security and system efficiency.

What Is New and What Is Not

The accelerator is the new part. Infineon shipped the Entry and Main lines in January 2025, built for motor control, reaching into power conversion only at the low end: lighting, workstation supplies, telecom power. Going from 300 kHz to 2 MHz is a different product, not a relabel. But the Arm core is not new, the development toolchain is not new, and the security block extends what Infineon already sells.

Whether that beats the competition is harder to settle than the launch material implies. Texas Instruments has sold C2000 real-time parts into digital power control for years, and the trade coverage of that pairing reports an efficiency number rather than a control-loop ceiling. No switching-frequency figure for TI’s current parts appears in any of the material reviewed here. Infineon’s 2 MHz is a documented jump over Infineon’s own Main Line. Against its nearest competitor it stays an open question.

Why It Matters

Data center power supplies are where the gallium nitride transition is paying for itself, and the constraint has not been the transistor for some time. It has been the loop. A GaN half-bridge can switch faster than a general-purpose microcontroller can sample, compute and act, so designers either slow the switch down or hand the fast path to analog circuits nobody can revise in firmware later. A 500 kHz digital loop moves that boundary. So which supplies get it first, and when? Infineon has not said. For an engineer specifying a 2027 server PSU, the binding number is not the ceiling but the availability date, and that is the one the company withheld.

Both market figures above come from Infineon itself. The company also sizes the adjacent motor-control MCU market at about 1.1 billion euros in 2025, growing to roughly 2 billion by 2030. Vukicevic called those estimates conservative. They are unaudited vendor projections all the same. Do they tell a buyer anything about whether this part ships on time, or at what cost? They do not.

Critical Perspective

Infineon’s own arithmetic limits the headline. At the 2 MHz ceiling the 500 kHz loop updates once every four switching cycles, so the control advantage thins where the headline sits. Both market figures, 0.4 billion euros now and 0.7 billion by 2030, come from Infineon itself. With no price, no sampling date, and pin count rising from 80 to 100, how is a designer meant to cost the board change?