Agreement provides OEM customers in Asia low-risk, multi-sourcing options for digital power

GE Energy has agreed to license the DLynx™ Digital Point-of-Load (POL) DC power converter product portfolio to FDK Corporation (FDK). The technology licensing agreement is designed to help original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers in Asia optimize energy efficiency, lower cooling requirements, reduce risk and accelerate new product development efforts. The GE Energy DLynx products licensed to FDK also help OEMs achieve supply chain objectives by providing multiple sourcing options which are fully compatible and interoperable with each other, ranging in capacity from 3 Amps to 40 Amps. 

The recently expanded DLynx portfolio leverages the strengths of digital technology to efficiently power silicon devices such as processors and memory devices on circuit boards. The licensing agreement with FDK includes DOSA digital POL standard products. Designed to lower risk and accelerate new product development efforts across multiple OEMs, the standards-based DOSA footprints and analog/digital compatibility with existing circuit board designs shrinks the size, lowers the cost and improves the performance of DC-DC converter modules.

“GE Energy is pleased to enter this licensing agreement with FDK as part of our strategy to ease the global adoption of digital power technology in new product designs,” said Jeff Schnitzer, president of GE Energy’s Power Electronics business. “Together, we are providing power design engineers the benefits of digital technology cost-effectively, with the safety of full analog compatibility, in an end-to-end Total Efficiency™ architecture.”

Digital power provides access to critical load information including current and voltage, enabling the system to monitor the power consumption at the highest possible resolution — at the processor or other silicon load. Offering double the density of a discrete power design, DLynx POLs meet IPC-9592 performance and reliability requirements. Employing the industry-standard PMBus™ interface and patented space-saving Tunable Loop™ technology to optimize transient response, new product design engineers have the flexibility to increase or decrease the needed power level throughout the development cycle without requiring board spins. Pin-compatible analog versions of the digital modules offer design flexibility and value engineering savings opportunities.

The licensing agreement between GE Energy and FDK enables OEM customers to source digital POLs from multiple vendors. Because of this agreement, OEMs can avoid industry interoperability challenges of multi-vendor differences in control loop dynamics, digital instruction set functionality and performance characteristics.

For more information, please visit ge.com/energy or fdk.com.

Posted by Ron M. Seidel

April 19, 2012