Vicor reveals new ChiP power package at APEC 2013

Dr. Vinciarelli speaking to a full house at APEC

Patrizio Vinciarelli’s Opening Plenary talk at APEC on Monday March 18^th, was entitled “Power components come of age”.  I spoke to Vinciarelli earlier that morning and he stressed that the power industry has not had major strides recently in greatly improving efficiency; however, Vicor has been able to shrink the size of its power devices, using the innovative and efficient ZVS technology that they have perfected. While they, like the rest of the industry, have not made great strides in improved efficiency (Even tenths of a percent improvement in today’s products is remarkable) they were able to innovate the excess heat removal from their solutions in a very cost-effective way.

Their new ChiP technology takes a relatively thin, scalable magnetic flat panel and literally saws the individual devices in a similar manner that semiconductor suppliers saw a wafer full of microcontrollers or A to D converters.

This is not only a very cost effective way to produce thermally efficient packaging, but to scale it as well. Notice that all the devices are the same width.

This ChiP technology is so flexible that the first groups of Vicor products are:

• AC/DC with PFC
• Isolated Bus Conversion (IBC)
• DC/DC conversion
• Buck, Boost and Buck-Boost regulation
• PoL current multiplication

The technology is also scalable:

• From 4.7 mm thin
• 0623 and 6123 and expanding
• Up to 108 A
• Up to 430 V and rising
• Up to 1.5 kW and rising

The new technology is setting new standards in the industry:

• Up to 3 Kw/in3 power density
• Up to 850 W/in2 area density
• Up to 98% efficiency

“Converter housed in package”

1323 VTM Current Multiplier ChiP .  Up to 48x current multiplication with up to 180 A, 96% peak efficiency

• Magnetic panel, over-molded above and below high density PCB substrate
• ChiP cut out of panel exposes “bar code” interconnect terminals

1323 sitting next to an Intel processor

Simple liquid-cooling is possible such as in an automotive system

Not just one component but complete systems can be architected

Vicor’s PoL solutions and AC/DC along with factorized bus allows faster time to market for designers to create a full power management solution for their system

All the important criteria are met with this innovative technique that scales from full brick down to 1/16 brick size

Vicor has done it again with their continued efforts to cleverly pack more power into a smaller footprint, while providing a cost-effective full solution from AC to PoL and factorized bus in between.