IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2022 - 15

demands, the power supply industry has also kept pace with
the needs of the markets. As a result, power integration,
both in package and on-chip, has continued to evolve for
more than a decade. Consequently, with this evolution,
power density has risen from tens of watts to hundreds of
watts from compact semiconductor packages with high performance
in efficiency, density, reliability and other such
metrics. On-chip, we are talking about tens of watts delivered
from monolithic semiconductor substrates.
Lately, many emerging applications like Internet of
Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), data processing
systems, impl anted medical devices with integrated
power sources and electrification of transportation are
demanding even further advances in these products and
technologies. They are seeking new solutions with unprecedented
levels of power density with high efficiency and
reliability from a highly integrated power supply in package
(PSiP) and power supply on-chip (PwrSoC) devices.
By definition, supported by Power Sources Manufacturers
Association (PSMA) and Anagenesis, PSiP is a power
device that contains a complete converter, which includes
PWM controller, power switches, drivers, power magnetics
and compensation network, in 1.0 # 1.0 # 1.0 inches
(25.4 # 25.4 # 25.4 mm) or less package size [1].
Commercial and Industrial Drivers
Some key factors driving system designers toward integrated
PSiPs and PwrSoCs versus traditional discrete point-of-load
(PoL) power conversion designs are time to market, size
constraints, interconnect losses, reliability and ease of
design. As a result, the demand for integrated solutions in
traditional and emerging applications is on the rise. According
to Ada Cheng, market analyst at technical marketing
company Anagenesis based in Los Angeles, CA, USA, " PSiPs
and PwrSoCs are growing faster than the traditional power
supplies market, including converters and inverters. " She
believes that PSiP and PwrSoC products have become more
prominent and mainstream, driven by the emerging applications.
While advances in technologies continue to push the
performance envelope of PSiPs and PwrSoCs, Anagenesis
president Arnold Alderman sees more PSiP players adding
resources for better PwrSoC development positioning. In
addition, he continued, " New global heterogeneous integration
community will accelerate further developments in PwrSoC.
Furthermore, merchant integrated magnetics, a key
component in PwrSoC, is now commercially available. "
Another marketing company Research & Markets,
Dubln, Ireland, is projecting this market to grow at a compound
annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.4% over the forecast
period of 2019-2027. As per the analytical data of Research
& Markets, North America alone will witness a market
value of about $2.715 B USD by 2027. By comparison,
Micro-Tech Consultants website reports that the global
consumption of switching power supplies (merchant),
which includes ac-dc switchers and dc-dc converters, is
estimated to be over $33.92 billion (B) USD in 2020, and is
expected to reach around $46.613 B USD by 2025, accounting
for a CAGR of 6.6%. Per company website, " Amidst the
COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the power supply industry did
better because most people stayed at home and employees
worked from home to avoid contact with fellow humans,
and purchased large quantities of electronic equipment
suitable for home-based work, activities and entertainment,
said Mohan Mankikar, the founder and president of
Micro-Tech Consultants based in Santa Rosa, CA, USA.
In an APEC 2010 presentation by Alderman of Anagenesis
and Cian O'Mathuna of Tyndall National Institute in Cork,
Ireland, the researchers reported that 1/32 brick dimensions
were 0.67 # 0.87 # 0.265 inches and that output current was
capped at 10-12 A. Also, no commercial PwrSoC products
were available in 2010. However, the researchers projected
that PwrSoC revenues will overtake PSiP by 2020 (Figure 1).
The projections for the APEC 2010 presentation were later
revised higher, according to Anagenesis.
Commercial vendors driving this miniaturization trend
include Intel Corp. Vicor Corp., Murata Power Solutions, ON
Semiconductor, Texas Instruments Inc., Infineon Technologies,
Bel Fuse Inc, ASE Group, TDK Corp., Amkor Technology,
and Jiangsu Changjiang Electronics Technology Co. Ltd.
to name a few. Meanwhile, to quickly advance power conversion
skills at the system level, some bigger players struggling
to keep up with the power management needs of new generation
microprocessors, FPGAs, ASICs and other similar
semiconductor devices, have acquired leading-edge power
management IC makers in the industry.
Intel, for example, acquired Enpirion, a specialist in
PSiP and PwrSoC products, a couple of years ago through
the acquisition of FPGA maker Altera, who in-turn bought
Enpirion in 2013 to bring on-board experts in PwrSoC technology.
A spin-off of Bell Labs, Enpirion was founded in
2001 by Dr. Ashraf Lofti in Hampton, NJ. It has been credited
for pioneering the development of commercial PwrSoC
products and technologies. Since joining Intel, Enpirion
has developed some leading-edge integrated power solutions
for FPGAs, CPUs, and ASICs that meet rigorous power
requirements for these devices. Concurrently, besides
standalone power SoCs that can reside in hybrid FPGA
packages, Enpirion has also been successful in generating
core-IP that makes it easy for integrating the PwrSoC with
the FPGA process. An example of this capability is evident
in the some new generation processors and FPGAs.
To eliminate traditional motherboard PwrSoCs or PSiPs,
similar efforts are underway to power microprocessors with
fully integrated voltage regulators (FIVRs) on-die. Towards
that goal, the processor giant Intel has reported powering
its fourth generation Core microprocessors (code name
Haswell) with FIVR integrated into the 22 nm processor die.
This granular approach of integrating FIVR on-die has also
been extended to new generation Intel Xeon scalable processor
(Figure 2). The processor datasheet shows that this
integration allows the processor to better control on-die
voltages to optimize both performance and power savings.
March 2022 z IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE 15
IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - March 2022

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