Navitas and Microchip Put 20 kW of 800-Volt-to-6-Volt Conversion in One Stage, But Name No Price and No Ship Date

Navitas Semiconductor and Microchip Technology have built a 20 kW reference design that converts an 800 VDC rack bus directly to a 6 VDC server rail. Every volt an AI rack pulls off the grid gets converted twice today before it reaches a GPU. This design does it once. It skips the intermediate 50-volt stage that sits in conventional data center power shelves. The platform targets the Open Compute Project 800 V DC architecture, and the two companies will show it at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose from October 12 to 15, 2026.

Sixteen Navitas NV6034 GaNFast FETs do the switching. Each is rated 650 V with 17 milliohms of on-resistance, packaged in an 8 by 8 millimeter dual-side-cooled DFN. The architecture uses two parallel 10 kW modules in an input-series, output-parallel configuration with a 128-to-1 full-bridge LLC topology. The companies target approximately 1 MHz switching frequency.

Microchip supplies the control and the security layer. A dsPIC33AK256MPS306 digital signal controller runs a 200 MHz 32-bit core with a double-precision floating-point unit, 78 picosecond high-resolution PWM and 12-bit analog-to-digital converters clocking up to 40 MSPS. A TA100 CryptoAuthentication device handles hardware security, with support for CNSA Suite 2.0 post-quantum cryptography.

The headline numbers are a peak efficiency of up to 96% at full load and a power density of 2,100 W per cubic inch. The companies describe the finished board as roughly 20% thinner than a mobile phone, which matters because it sits close to the GPU board rather than in a separate shelf.

What Is Genuinely New

The single-stage conversion is the real change, not the GaN content. Rack power today steps 800 VDC down to about 50 VDC, then down again to 6 VDC. Each stage costs efficiency, board area and parts. Collapsing both into one converter removes a whole power-conversion tier from the rack. The 650-volt device rating is the enabling detail: a stacked, input-series arrangement lets 650 V parts stand off an 800 V bus, so the design avoids the higher-voltage SiC devices that a single-stage topology would otherwise demand.

Why It Matters

Treat this as a signal about where 800 VDC distribution is heading, not as hardware to specify. The OCP 800 V DC architecture moved the industry’s rack bus up, and the supply chain is now competing on what happens after that bus. Two credible paths exist. One puts a solid-state transformer at the rack or row, which mgrid has tracked through DG Matrix, Delta Electronics and Alderbuck deployments. The other, shown here, keeps the bus simple and pushes the hard conversion down onto the GPU board. Buyers evaluating 800 VDC rooms should ask vendors which path their roadmap assumes, because the two choices put the efficiency losses and the service burden in different places. Navitas has been pushing conversion toward the die for a year, buying Claros to put voltage regulation millimeters from the AI chip.

Critical Perspective

Three caveats sit on top of the specification sheet. First, neither company disclosed a price or a ship date. A reference design is a proof that a topology works, not a part a buyer orders, and the gap between the two is often a year or more. Second, 96% is stated as a target peak at full load. Rack power rarely runs at full load, and the efficiency that matters is the weighted average across a real duty cycle, which nobody published. Third, Microchip and Navitas specify a power density of 2,100 W/in³. A board that dense has to reject its heat somewhere. The dual-side-cooled package points at a thermal design that depends on the host board, so the density figure belongs to the converter and not necessarily to the system it lands in.

The platform goes on display during OCP Global Summit week in San Jose, October 12 to 15, 2026. Ask for measured efficiency curves and a production date there.

Sources

• Power Electronics News, “Navitas, Microchip Develop 800V AI Data Center Reference Design” (October 9, 2026)
• Converge Digest, “Navitas and Microchip Unveil 20 kW 800V-to-6V GaN for AI Racks” (October 5, 2026)
• Power Semiconductors Weekly, “Microchip and Navitas Develop 800V-to-6V GaN Reference Design for AI Data Center Racks” (October 5, 2026)

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