INCEP Technologies Inc. (San Diego, CA) announced that it has signed an agreement with Hewlett-Packard (HP) to develop power delivery technologies for use in high-performance systems that use Itanium microprocessors, including HP’s Integrity enterprise servers. INCEP is establishing a new standard with its microprocessor power delivery architecture, which combines the microprocessor die and its chip-carrier substrates with the microprocessor’s power conditioning circuitry.
The INCEP solution requires only a single heat dissipating device and retention solution for the co-packaged microprocessor and power supply. INCEP has developed a patented approach of applying power to the surface of a microprocessor package, which supports traditional pin-grid array as well as land-grid array configurations. The solution also requires a high-performance power connector and a high-density dc/dc converter, which combine to deliver the necessary device power.
The assembly is referred to as the ZVRM™ Assembly for computing applications, and the Zbrick™ Assembly for communication applications. High-density power and thermal solutions are expected to be a key differentiator in systems, especially those that feature z-axis power technologies such as the HP mx2 module. Under the terms of the agreement, INCEP has made its innovations in power delivery available to HP for multi-processor power modules, and will be working with HP over the next three years on enterprise server microprocessor power delivery applications.
The INCEP technology will enable microprocessors to run over 200W at less than 1V. Due to the short path between the power supply and the device, the technology will support static device currents over 200A and dynamic currents over 5,000A/µs. The ZVRM and ZBrick Assemblies not only promise a performance roadmap that meets all device, power and system performance requirements, but it also plans to deliver reductions in cost compared to alternatives of up to 50% for the voltage regulation circuitry, 16% for the device package and over 20% on power delivery components at the system-level for the OEM.
