Flex Power Partners with Xilinx for Power System Optimization and Design

Flex Power Modules (Flex Power) is a division of Flex, an electronics manufacturing services company. Flex Power Modules and designs and manufactures scalable board-mounted power supply solutions to help improve the operational efficiencies of advanced data centers, information and communications technology networks, industrial equipment, and transportation/railway systems.

Recently, Flex Power announced its recent move in becoming a member of the Xilinx Partner Program. Xilinx Inc. specializes in the development and supply of complete programmable logic solutions. Products offered by the company include field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), system on a chip (SOC) devices, and Versal adaptive compute acceleration platforms (ACAPs). Both Flex Power and Xilinx plan to seamlessly integrate their software tools to help designers optimize their power systems, simplify the design process, and accelerate time to market.

Image used courtesy of Flex Power

 

The Xilinx Partner Program

Xilinx’s Partner Program enables its partners to provide a value-added proposition with differentiated services and solutions that can help promote the adoption of Xilinx’s technologies. Partners gain access to technical training events, invites to partner events, company profile exposure, as well as product/solution exposure through Xilinx’s website. For more details concerning the Partner Program and information concerning how to join, you can visit this page.

 

Xilinx and Flex Power

Through the partnership, customers can import SoC and FPGA data directly from the Xilinx Power Estimator (XPE) software tool into the Flex Power Designer (FPD). Engineers can access power consumption and other aspects of their simulated power or cooling systems to create the most suitable design to fit a real-world scenario. Being a part of the Xilinx Partner Program allows Flex Power and its customers to share and offer up ideas with other engineers in the Xilinx design community. This will enable the development of new solutions to design challenges.

Image used courtesy of Flex Power

Manuel Uhm, Director of Silicon Marketing at Xilinx, said: “Collaborating with Flex Power Modules enables streamlined power design flow for Xilinx devices to further benefit our customers, which helps to ensure they get the best possible power system design for their FPGA-based product.”

Mikael Appelberg, Chief Technology Officer at Flex Power Modules, said: “From talking to engineers, we know that power-stage design analysis is one of the key issues that can slow down working with FPGAs. Inaccurate load simulations can be a problem which this co-operation aims to solve.”

The FPD software can identify design issues such as transient power requirements and suggest suitable filter components. The software also provides key specifications for the converters and enables full simulation and optimization of the system-level power solution. Sequencing capabilities are also possible across several voltage rails and non-Flex solutions can be added where required.

Flex Power’s latest release (version 4.2 and later) supports Xilinx Virtex and Kintex UltraScale and UltraScale+ devices. The former company also plans to support more ranges of Xilinx FPGA devices and Adaptive SoCs in the future.