Empower Semiconductor wins coveted 2022 Leap Award

Empower Semiconductor, Milpitas, Calif., has won an honorable mention in the recently completed 2022 Leap Awards for product innovation.

The LEAP Awards celebrates the most innovative and forward-thinking products serving the design engineering space. Empower won in the category of power electronics, which covers power supplies, transistors and any other power electronic circuits, components or assemblies used in power electronics, including battery and battery management.

The winning entry was a series of quad-output DC/DC buck converters that combine the industry’s highest current density, fastest dynamic voltage scaling
(DVS), fastest load transient response and extensive fault protection, all with no external discrete components. This allows designers and system architects to quickly implement power management solutions while keeping power consumption to a minimum.

Empower’s IVRs are high-performance power management ICs implemented on deep submicron CMOS Processes. They have been designed to provide efficiency, size, and cost benefits to energy hungry, data-intensive, electronics applications by replacing traditional power management integrated circuits (PMICs) with a single tiny IC.

The EP71xx series delivers 12 A of continuous current with up to 4 voltage regulators in a single FcCSP package that measures just 5mm x 7mm and only 0.7mm in height. Maximum efficiencies can be achieved, minimizing losses across the widest possible range of operating conditions. Ultra-fast transient response supports regulation through a load step and the programmable sequencing provides the ultimate in power design flexibility. The DVS feature is more than 1000x faster than other competing technologies and enables rapid, lossless, processor state changes that can significantly reduce system power.

Target applications for the new series will include optical transceivers, active cables, storage devices, networking equipment, PoL power for CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and AI processors and 5G systems.