Power-One and Intersil announce license agreement

CAMARILLO & MILPITAS, USA: Power-One Inc. and Intersil Corp. announced an agreement under which Intersil has licensed Power-One's Digital Power Technologies (DPT).

The non-exclusive Field of Use license agreement for Power-One's DPT patents will benefit customers that use Intersil's point-of-load controllers, particularly those using Intersil's family of digital power products from Zilker Labs; the license also extends to Intersil's power module products.

The license expands the market for Power-One's digital power management technology and Intersil's industry leading analog and digital power management products that provide digital monitoring and control, including those that support the PMBus™ protocol.

Digital power technology enables customers to optimize power conversion efficiency, reduce energy costs, and enhance energy management capabilities. It drives increased power density, lower cooling costs, improved product functionality, advanced monitoring, and flexible product configuration.

This license marks another milestone in Power-One's growing partnerships with global leaders, opening the market and expanding access to power management products that support serial bus communications using the PMBus protocol.

The PMBus standard specification, developed by a consortium of 40 power supply, telecommunications equipment and semiconductor providers, defines a digital communication protocol that enables power converters to be configured, monitored and maintained according to a set of more than 100 commands.

PMBus provides increased reliability and system intelligence. Designers can set a power supply's operating parameters, monitor operation and perform corrective measures in response to faults or if the power shuts a system down.

Zilker Labs' patented Digital-DC technology is an innovative mixed-signal power conversion and management architecture that combines an efficient digital loop synchronous switching regulator, adaptive MOSFET drivers and a digital control interface into one IC.

This unique approach provides superior efficiency, flexibility and scalability while decreasing board space and design complexity by reducing the number of discrete components. Intersil acquired Zilker Labs in December 2008, and this license agreement allows Zilker Labs' products to address an even broader range of applications.