everything PE recently interviewed Tim Phillips, Chief Executive Officer & President, and Founder of Empower Semiconductor. Empower Semiconductor specializes in designing and manufacturing highly efficient and compact integrated voltage regulators (IVRs) and power management integrated circuits (PMICs).

Q. Can you tell us about Empower Semiconductor? When was the company formed and how has it evolved over the years?

Tim Phillips: Empower Semiconductor is based in Silicon Valley and was founded in 2014 by Gene Sheridan, David Lidsky, and myself – a veteran team, each with 30-plus years of experience in the semiconductor industry and specifically in power management. We founded Empower Semiconductor with a mission to minimize the energy footprint of the digital economy; recognizing early on that power management was lagging behind the technology leaps that digital devices like processors, DSPs, and FPGAs were experiencing. 

Today, Empower Semiconductor powers the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution with FinFast™ technology by reducing the energy footprint and total cost of ownership of data centers. Our true vertical power platform, Crescendo, delivers kilowatt range on-demand scalable power with the speed, precision, and signal integrity required by AI processors. Our power-management architecture shrinks solution footprint, height, and component count, achieving vertical power delivery (VPD) with unprecedented power density and efficiency.

Over the past several years, we have been investing heavily in research and product development resulting in already two generations of products that showcased our ability to embed and integrate all power components in a single compact device. Today, with our third generation, we are focused almost entirely on solving the massive power delivery bottleneck that AI and high-performance computing (HPC) processors are creating in the data center space.

Q. Can you tell us more about your product portfolio? 

Tim Phillips: Our product portfolio consists of several generations of integrated voltage regulator (IVR) and ECAP devices that customers can choose from based on their application requirements. Our IVR product line offers fully programmable step-down solutions that range from several tens of watts to kilowatts. These solutions have the ability to be deployed anywhere in the system: from embedding the power converters onto a substrate for a chiplet architecture to traditional board-level mounting to now – true vertical power and backside mounting. 

Ultra-Compact Integrated Voltage Regulators (IVRs) from Empower Semiconductor

Our silicon capacitors line, or ECAPs, have similar flexibility with solutions for printed circuit board (PCB) mounting and substrate embedding.  For all of our offerings, we also have the ability to modify or custom design solutions to fit a certain form factor, performance level, or specific implementation. Our main differentiation revolves around our FinFast™ technology; at its core, is our ability to move power, currents, and voltages, at speeds that are significantly faster than industry standards in power management.

E-CAP Capacitor Technology from Empower Semiconductor

Q. Which market segments do you cater to? Which segment is the largest for you?

Tim Phillips: AI and HPC in the data center are our main market segments. Empower also targets the telecom and networking, computing (computer on module, or CoM, and system on module, or SoM), and medical markets.

Q. GPUs and CPUs supporting the AI revolution are increasingly more power-hungry. What are the challenges of power delivery in this space? 

Tim Phillips: As modern data center workloads increasingly demand more power and speed, existing power-delivery architectures are no longer viable. At the high level, AI processors current density is increasing much faster than the power supply current density and that creates a huge mismatch in technology. To deliver high efficiency, traditional lateral power delivery (LPD) solutions operate slowly, creating a large footprint of bulky power stages and magnetics on the topside of the PCB. The slow speeds also require large capacitor banks in the shadow of the processor, occupying the most power-sensitive real estate in the system and resulting in substantial lateral transmission power losses. These transmission losses, hence, system losses, rise exponentially with the power and current increase of new AI chips; this creates a critical impasse for the industry that we are solving for the current and next generations of AI and HPC processors.

Q. Back to your core technology, what differentiates your FinFast™ technology from other more traditional power management solutions?

Tim Phillips: Empower recognized early on that the only way to design and provide a novel and breakthrough approach to power delivery was to combine and optimize all aspects and elements of power management. This was not a simple task, and it took many years and patent to achieve. Traditional power management solutions typically focus on improving one or two aspects at most, such as process or package, leaving the rest untouched. Unfortunately, you are only as good as your lowest-performing link.

FinFast^™ technology operates with benchmark efficiency at blazing speed. It has been built over five main pillars or critical Ips: 

1. Innovative architectures and control techniques: This is instrumental to get high frequency regulation at the high speed we operate at.
2. Use of FinFETs as power devices: Empower is the first company to use such deep submicron process to build a power supply. We did several things from an IP standpoint to turn these FinFETs, the same ones used in advanced processors, into high-current power devices. We make them deliver high power efficiently with very high bandwidth.
3. High-frequency magnetics: We have developed our own version of high frequency magnetics. This was a challenge as the industry has always been used to low frequency switching; we have managed to break those barriers and are getting great performance there.
4. Wide bandwidth silicon capacitors: The bandwidth needed by our regulators demand capacitors with almost no parasitics: sub pico henry inductances and sub milli ohm resistance. Our silicon capacitors give us the bandwidth needed to handle the fast changes in load current.
5. Thermally optimized packages: We build very efficient packages at high frequency that are also extremely thermally efficient. With our compact and thin packages, the thermal conductivity is extremely good.

Q. Any significant upcoming products or developments in Empower Semiconductor’s lineup?

Tim Phillips: In October 2024, we unveiled the Crescendo vertical power delivery platform to address the growing power demands of AI and HPC applications. Featuring FinFast™ technology, the Crescendo platform unlocks scalable on-demand true VPD for upwards of 3,000A power domains, offering an unprecedented combination of system efficiency, current density, and nanoseconds transient response.

Crescendo Vertical Power Platform from Empower Semiconductor

Crescendo eliminates the capacitor bank and energy storage requirements by providing energy on demand to the AI chip at unprecedented speed and accuracy. With the capacitors eliminated, Crescendo’s high-density and ultrathin thermally enhanced package fit in the critical area under the processor to deliver high efficiency, vertically coupled power to the AI chip and eliminate the prohibitive lateral transmission loss. 

Q. What are the main benefits of the new Crescendo platform?

Tim Phillips: There are a number of benefits, including:

1. Efficiency: By relocating the power regulator underneath the processor, Crescendo sidesteps the incurred losses associated with routing power across the PCB of traditional lateral power delivery. This translates into a 10% lower power dissipation for today’s systems with xPU cores at about 1,000 A range, to up to 20% for the next generations of xPUs which will double that current requirement.
2. Power Density: FinFast™ technology has made Crescendo devices significantly smaller and thinner than their discrete counterparts, with up to 8x height reduction. Additionally, the fast-switching speed of FinFast™ technology, along with the integration of power stages, inductors, and input capacitors into the Crescendo package, eliminates the need for external devices and larger banks of decoupling capacitors. Instead, designers can place Crescendo opposite to the processor, consuming minimal space. For example, a power solution that would have required 4200 mm² and 10 mm height can be reduced to 750 mm² and 1.25 mm height with Crescendo. The result is 5x greater power density than LPD solutions.
3. Transient Response: Crescendo devices leverage the fast-switching speeds of FinFast™ technology to offer improved transient response results in up to 30x to 40x faster regulation, enabling significantly higher performance and compute power (MIPS/W) in data centers.

Q. Empower expanded its sales channel with the pan-European Dimac Red SpA earlier this year. How is your market penetration and presence across the continents?

Tim Phillips: We are focused on where our customers are globally. The United States is our main market for AI and data centers; EMEA and notably Israel are seeing some great activity while China is ramping up fast.

About Tim Phillips

Tim Phillips has an impressive track record of delivering profitable results while building innovative power management businesses over his 30-year career in the semiconductor industry. In prior roles with the company, Tim has served as Chief Operating Officer and as SVP Sales & Marketing since founding Empower in 2014. In prior roles, Tim served as VP of North America for Infineon, where he was responsible for more than $600M in annual sales. Previously, Tim founded the Enterprise Power BU at International Rectifier where he served as VP & General Manager, growing the business to more than $150M in annual revenue. Tim earned both his MBA and BSEE from the University of Rhode Island. He holds 25 US patents with several others pending.