CEO Interview with Thar Casey of AmberSemi

Thar Casey is a serial entrepreneur, focused on disruptive, game changing technology architecture. Today, he is the CEO of AmberSemi, a young California-based fabless semiconductor company advancing next-generation power management (conversion, control and protection) that revolutionizes electrical products and semiconductor device performance, energy efficiency and reliability. AmberSemi is delivering a generational architecture upgrade to power infrastructure globally.

Tell us about your company?

AmberSemi is a fabless semiconductor company developing next-generation power conversion, control and protection solutions. Its patented innovations aim to improve power management across industries, including data centers, networking, telecom, industrial manufacturing, and consumer electronics. AmberSemi develops power architectures that move beyond traditional passive-analog technologies, incorporating embedded intelligence for greater safety and reliability. Headquartered in Dublin, California, the company is a member of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association and the Global Semiconductor Alliance. AmberSemi has received industry recognition, including Time Magazine’s Best Inventions (2021), Fast Company’s Next Big Thing in Tech (2022), the Edison Award for Innovation (2023 Gold & 2024 Silver), recognition as one of the top four Global Semiconductor Alliances’ Startups to Watch (2023) and a spot on EE Times’ 100 Startups Worth Watching (2024).

With 49 granted US patents and over 50 pending, the company’s breakthroughs in digital control of electricity yielded two core technologies:

Next-gen power conversion enabled by an active architecture that utilizes digital control and precision sensing, delivering superior conversion efficiency, power density, and performance.

A first of its kind power switching and protection enabled by direct digital control and precision sensing, delivering intelligent power control and faster protection for higher reliability and better uptime.

These technologies are being productized to upgrade power architecture across trillions of devices globally and enable disruptive “killer app” enhancements to AI, EV, data center power and more.

The company’s first two commercial semiconductor lines for AC-to-DC Conversion and Switch Control and Protection will be available later this year and next, respectively.

What problems are you solving?

AI-data centers are a quintessential example of the problem with today’s electrical architecture. The industry is driven by the development and use of language learning models, and, by driving more advanced AI processing from advanced GPU/CPU chips, they can do this processing faster and more effectively than ever before. The challenge is that these new chips require much more power. Generation of power is a major issue and many new technologies are being developed to fix this through new sources of power generation, such as nuclear, fusion, fuel-cell, etc. This focus is pushing hyperscalers to build new facilities that better secure the energy needed to power their processors. Yet, the current power conversion architecture in every server is highly inefficient, like a leaky pipe that never gives the water pressure you want.

Industries like data centers, telecommunications, and networking require advanced power management to keep pace with technological developments, like AI. Current power architectures are unable to scale efficiently to meet the increasing power demands of these advanced processors, and these issues further multiply as power demand increases. Amber’s unique approach incorporates semiconductor physics, materials science, and advanced packaging to solve these issues in a revolutionary approach to power delivery.

AmberSemi’s announcement of 50VDC-to-0.8VDC conversion for AI data centers re AI data centers moves conversion steps, reducing inefficiency by half, adding 9% more power from the rack directly to the AI-chip, saving $4 billion annually. (Each 1% efficiency improvement is half a billion dollars in savings in the US and a reduction of 1.7M tons CO2.)

As industries move toward more modern fully solid-state power systems and smarter electrical integration, AmberSemi’s innovations sit at the center of this transition, contributing to a more sustainable, higher-performance electrical infrastructure.

What application areas are your strongest?

AmberSemi’s breakthroughs in power management strongly serve multiple sectors, including data centers, industrial, automotive, commercial/residential building applications and more.

Data Centers / Industrial Protections: Data centers and industrial factories benefit from digitized, more intelligent power. Data centers or factory operating downtime triggered by transient events, like short circuits, is a major concern. A short circuit event in one location cascades down the line, tripping all breakers, taking down the system and costing thousands to millions of dollars per hour. AmberSemi’s extremely fast (3,000x faster than today’s standard) arc-free solid-state switching control and protection platform isolates the event to a single, initial circuit breaker/motor location, directly stopping cascade effects.

AmberSemi’s breakthrough technologies are being applied to solve an even more critical problem today: the accelerating power crisis driven by AI-datacenters’ power demands.  Amber’s power conversion solutions remove conversion steps from the data center wall to /through the rack down to the CPU/GPU. By removing steps, AmberSemi lifts efficiency rates dramatically – an estimated 50% improvement over current losses. Most importantly, AmberSemi will deliver increases in power density enabling more AI computing.

Commercial/Residential: Buildings can integrate smart circuit breakers and connected electrical systems and products to improve safety, efficiency, and significant IoT feature additions. These Amber-powered products support access control, fire control, smart building automation and security systems, ensuring more than just reliable power management, but enhanced environmental and energy awareness and more. Essentially, buildings gain a network of intelligent monitoring points powered by Amber, enhancing security, automation management and operational oversight.

What keeps your customers up at night?

Often internal innovation at established companies is limited by headwinds from the current business priorities, such as existing technologies,  and models with established financials.

Our customers are hungry for new innovation from technology providers, such as semiconductor companies to provide them with solutions to utilize. If innovation is limited due to legacy approaches to problems there won’t be revolutionary leaps forward, which is what the industry desperately seeks. Amber’s out of the box thinking that is unencumbered by history is working with these innovative and leading-edge customers to deliver the solutions they need.

AmberSemi’s disruptive opportunity is to deliver generational power architecture innovations that modernize legacy old, established power systems:

Protection Products: Semiconductors provide tremendous benefits, yet the challenge is making the transition from manufacturing mechanical products to PCB based electronic products. Amber’s new solid-state power architecture simplifies this development effort for companies, dramatically through a single, flexible IC that acts as the heart for these systems when it comes to sensing and control without compromising their own core IP.

Data-Center Products: The industry seeks more AI-computing from CPUs/GPUs in data centers; yet current power infrastructure is highly inefficient creating cooling issues in current servers. Simultaneously AI-GPU/CPU manufacturers are working on faster processing, but the new chips power demand aren’t supported by existing infrastructure.

Amber solves these issues through its high-density vertical power delivery solution that drastically decreases wasted energy, while increasing power available to Ai-chips for more computing.

What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?

Protection Products: There is no direct competition for what Amber is providing to this market – semiconductor-based switch control and protection.

The market currently is focused around electromechanical architectures, but there is already a shift towards using semiconductors instead. Amber’s products don’t compete with any product directly, as they are purpose-built devices for specific markets and applications and simplify / fix some of the native challenges of standard parts, such as a microcontroller.

In fact, Amber is partnering with major semiconductor companies that manufacture power devices such as Si / SiC MOSFETs, IGBTs and more. We provide a strategic pathway for them to increase sales  in general and tap into new blue ocean markets.

Data Centers: We are currently at the limit of today’s power delivery architecture due to fundamental issues, such as inefficiencies from pushing so much current across the server board. Vertical power delivery is the only viable solution recognized by the market to meet the ever-increasing power demand.

Currently there are no vertical solutions available on the market. While we see some young companies investigating these opportunities and developing new technologies, from what we can see and hear from our customers, there are no complete solutions on the horizon from these companies – except from AmberSemi.

Amber is developing a very disruptive complete 50V to 0.8V solution with vertical power delivery that aims to transform both power efficiency from the rack to the load and deliver the power directly to the CPU/GPU for substantially more AI computing.

What new features/technology are you working on?

AmberSemi recently announced our new third product line, which is now under development, targeting enhanced power efficiency and power density for AI data centers. The category is one of the hottest – if not the hottest – tech categories today, due to the demand for more AI computing.  Yet, the inherent challenges to supply enough power within data centers, limits AI computing. CPUs and GPUs in AI data center server racks require from 20x to as much as 40x the power for their high-performance computing, which current data centers can’t provide.  Getting to more AI computing today essentially means building new data centers, as retrofittable solutions for current data centers are not available.

AmberSemi’s complete solution to convert high voltage DC to low voltage DC vertically to the processors solves the current efficiency issues and provides a scalable path for the future. We enhance efficiency at the server rack level that translates to increased power density or more power directly to the chips enabling more AI computing.

The announcement has garnered significant market attention from the largest tech players on earth, because of the very disruptive nature of this recent breakthrough. In addition, this comes on the heels of the successful validation and commercialization of Amber’s first two product lines: dramatically smaller AC-DC conversion and the first of its kind solid-state switch control and protection. Both will be available on the market this year and next respectively.

How do customers normally engage with your company?

The Amber team’s significant experience in a range of key markets helps identify weakness in the current semiconductor offering on the market and opportunities in the range of electrical products applications. Amber uses this expertise to define how our parts perform and how best to simplify and improve designs. We work directly with our customers on these requirements in developing our solutions to deliver significant improvements in their products. This process allows them to differentiate and improve their products versus current offerings and better protect their IP.

Today, AmberSemi has a pool of 50 or so Alpha / Beta customers who are actively engaged with us, have tested and validated our technologies or plan to in the near future.

Contact AmberSemi

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