PowerLattice is an up-and-coming star in the power electronics space. Their millions of chips smartly interconnected on their groundbreaking chiplet laid the blueprint to energize energy efficiency in electronic devices. The startup, co-founded by Peng Zou, has miniaturized high-voltage regulators into tiny chiplets. Revolutionary chiplets like these have recently begun running at never before seen high frequencies. This technology enables PowerLattice’s solutions to reduce power consumption by half. All along, it provides double the performance per watt of conventional systems.
The startup’s chiplets are only 100 micrometers thick. They use less space than 1/20th the footprint of traditional voltage regulators, making them extraordinarily space-efficient. PowerLattice’s technology moves the voltage conversion process even closer to the processor itself. This development prevents valuable power loss and strengthens the company’s status as an agile competitor to bigger industry leaders. This technology has accomplished more than just increased efficiency. It really could revolutionize what’s possible with power management for HPC systems.
A Leap in Efficiency
PowerLattice’s chiplets leverage an innovative magnetic alloy to build inductors that work effectively in high frequencies. This unique approach is what enables the company to run inductors at frequencies up to a hundred times higher than conventional solutions. It works to increase their productivity and effectiveness. Zou emphasized the significance of this development, stating that “this has almost become a show-stopping issue today,” referring to the ongoing challenges in power delivery within modern electronic systems.
The startup’s unique design takes a smart look at power consumption that leads to a noticeable boost in performance. By shortening the physical distance that high current needs to traverse in order to reach processors, PowerLattice smartly achieves less power loss. Hanh-Phuc Le, a researcher in power electronics at the University of California, San Diego, underlined that particular insight. He continued, saying the further distance high current has to travel the more power is lost. To realize this principle has been the basic foundation of technological innovations of PowerLattice.
PowerLattice’s chiplets provide the configurability and scalability that chip producers crave to create flexible solutions. As Zou characterized their technology, it’s “highly configurable and scalable,” enabling wide-ranging applications across many different electronic platforms.
Competing with Industry Giants
As PowerLattice creates smart glass, they’re competing against larger, more established R&D groups such as Qualcomm. She also pointed out that a lot of Qualcomm’s customers for their processors regularly have to purchase custom-made Qualcomm power management chips with them. This requirement builds a dependency in the market. Qualcomm, for instance, gets to sell their processor chip and the overwhelming share of their customers need to buy their special sauce proprietary Qualcomm power supply management chip because otherwise they would go, ‘We don’t guarantee the reliable operation of the whole system,’” Le recalled.
Even among this crowded, competitive landscape, PowerLattice has found its unique place by addressing chiplet implementation, which is aligned with the current heterogeneous integration mega trend. Le remarked on this emerging trend, stating, “There’s a trend of what we call chiplet implementation, so it is a heterogeneous integration.” This unique integration provides companies with more ease of use and efficiency than with the legacy approach.
Zou went on to confidently underscore PowerLattice’s excellent market position. The cloud differs from their approach, as this makes them different than larger competitors, he noted. “From a market position perspective, we are quite a bit different,” he said. This differentiation could enable PowerLattice to gain traction with clients seeking fast, innovative solutions that aren’t chained to proprietary opaque systems.
Future Implications
The intended benefits of PowerLattice’s technology go well beyond one product. Being able to reduce overall power consumption by 50 percent produces significant cost benefits to operators. This amendment further improves the sustainability of electronic devices. With industries adopting energy efficiency in a big way, startups such as PowerLattice can help tech take a big step in the right direction.
The company’s prioritization of miniaturization and efficiency touches on a larger movement within the tech industry at large. As electronic devices continue to become more powerful and compact, the need for productive power management solutions will increasingly be in demand. Le noted that partnerships between startups could foster innovation in this space: “That’s how the market is. We’re a little dynamic startup that works with this other very dynamic startup. Together, we are directly, positively, and intentionally competing with the largest corporations in our industry.