Vicor: Power conversion
Vicor believes it is poised to alter the power landscape with an innovative new architecture.
by Terrence Lynch -- Movers and Shakers, 8/15/2003
IT'S BEEN 20 YEARS SINCE Vicor Corp unveiled the first compact, "brick"-style power supplies, which gave engineers new options in electronics design. Now, the company is poised to repeat that performance.
"Our investments in new technologies have, we believe, brought us to the brink of a major transition in the power-component marketplace," says Patrizio Vinciarelli, Vicor's chairman, president, and CEO. This spring, the company introduced what it calls Factorized Power Architecture (FPA), a new approach to power-supply design that cuts the devices' size and cost while boosting performance and power density
The company says that FPA solves several problems that have arisen as electronic systems have grown more sophisticated. For example, many products require multiple supplies--their digital components operate on steadily lower supply voltages but their macro-world devices, like speakers, twisted-pair cables, and certain analog devices, still need high bus voltages to operate. The increasing sensitivity of modern, dense ICs to electromagnetic interference has also led to design headaches with conventional power supplies. And some attempts at dealing with these problems, most notably the intermediate bus architecture, leave nonisolated converters near the components they're supplying, leaving them vulnerable to faults and ground loops.
FPA distributes the essential power-supply functions of electrical isolation, voltage conversion, regulation, and EMI suppression between two separate ICs. The first is a preregulator module (PRM), which takes in unregulated supply power and turns out a regulated "factorized power bus" voltage. The second is a voltage-transformation module (VTM), which handles isolation and stepping of the PRM's output to the level desired at any particular device (or "point of load," in industry jargon).
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| Patrizio Vinciarelli, Chairman, President, and CEO, Vicor |
For now, the company will only say that the devices are based on new and proprietary "enabling technologies." They supply up to 200 watts of power in a BGA package occupying less than 0.25 cubic inches. Thus, the V·I chips offer power densities of up to 800 watts per cubic inch--five times better than any competitive product, according to Vicor. They also enjoy conversion efficiencies of approximately 95 percent and response times in the microsecond range. Prices will run as low as $0.12/watt or $0.31/amp in OEM quantities.
"This new approach to power conversion maximizes the competitiveness of our customers' power systems with the highest degree of system flexibility, power density, conversion efficiency, transient responsiveness, noise performance, and field reliability ever achieved," Vinciarelli says.
So far, the company has introduced a VTM to meet the demands of advanced DSPs, FPGAs, ASICs, processor cores, and microprocessor applications at the point of load. It has also released a VTM variant called a bus converter module (BCM) for applications that currently use an intermediate-voltage-bus architecture. The BCM delivers an isolated 12-volt dc bus from a nominal 48-volt dc source. It provides as much as 200 watts of power to nonisolated converters at the point of load and can be wired in parallel with other BCMs for redundancy or to provide more power.
"A steady stream of FPA products will be introduced in the next several months, including the V·I Chip PRM," Vinciarelli says.
Vicor is clearly bullish on the new power-supply paradigm it's invented. The company recently announced that it will be recalling furloughed workers to assemble the devices. And the company says it has begun negotiations with other manufacturers to license the technology in order to "amplify the overall market opportunity and enhance [our] total return on investment in V·I chips, and in the R&D of the underlying technologies." Vinciarelli has proudly called factorized power a "disruptive" technology, adding, "We expect [it] to fundamentally alter the future of the power-component industry."
That is not to say that Vicor
won't continue producing conventional and specialized power-supply designs. For example, the company's VIPAC line allows users to quickly and easily build custom systems from modular, pre-tested power-supply components. Its military products provide users with commercial, off-the-shelf designs configured to withstand harsh environments and high-reliability applications.The debut of the new technology couldn't come at a better time. Like most electronics suppliers, Vicor has suffered during the industry's downturn the past three years. "Vicor has not been immune to the effects of the severe correction to earlier industry excesses," Vinciarelli says. "We do not, however, view the negative economic conditions as a reason for taking negative steps. Vicor is financially strong, we have a broad and growing range of leading-edge products and services, and we're phasing new products into manufacturing that we believe will set new price-performance standards in the power marketplace.
