Digital Power–Is It Still Alive?

Digital power technology has been at in the center of power market for the past five years. Many extraordinary advances have occurred during this time—including power stage integration, the mixing of digital circuitry with analog and the arrival of bus communication capabilities in the form of PMBus and I2C. There have been hindrances as well—such as litigation over PMBus, the development of user friendly Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and the global economic slowdown that started in 2008 and extended into 2009.

Today, two approaches to digital power dominate the market:

* Digital Power Managers (DPMs) are devices that use digital information to manage the overall functioning of the power system and the power supplies within it. With DPMs, digital signals are used for communication to and from the power supplies to monitor and manage power-up, sequencing, load sharing and balancing, fault conditions, hot swapping, maintenance issues and other tasks.
* Digital Controllers of Power (DCPs) are controllers that use digital techniques to control the power-switching functions within a power supply unit. In its most theoretical form, this means performing the analog-to-digital conversion as early as possible, so that all feedback and control functions in the supply are processed in the digital domain.

iSuppli Corp.’s latest forecast for digital power shows the market will grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 45.3 percent during the next five years. The largest expansions are predicted to be in the high-end server, datacom and telecom markets, with growth expected to pick up afterward in the lower-end compute markets such as notebook PCs and graphic cards.

iSuppli believes several events that occurred within the past year and a half have impacted the digital power market:

* Infineon’s acquisition of Primarion
* Exar’s purchase of Fyrestorm’s Intellectual Property (IP)
* Intersil’s buy of Zilker Labs
* Texas Instruments’ acquisition of Ciclon
* Power One’s patent litigation victory regarding digital power over the PMBus
* Volterra’s aggressiveness in capturing Point-of-Load (POL) market share
* The licensing by Linear Technology, Infineon and Texas Instruments of Power One’s digital power patents

All of the events during the past five years have established the path for a dominant technology: DCP. Within DCP technology, two groups of designs are dominant: Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-based and microcontroller PID-memory based. iSuppli believes the microcontroller PID-memory designs will be dominant due to their flexibility and lower level of complexity.