Key Takeaways
- Ferric designs and manufactures Integrated Voltage Regulators (IVRs) that enhance power efficiency and reduce system footprint in high-performance computing.
- Ferric's IVR products can achieve a solution current density exceeding 4A/mm2 with conversion efficiency better than 94%.
- The company addresses the growing power demands of AI processors, which can exceed 2000 Watts, through advanced power delivery solutions.
Noah Sturcken is a Founder and CEO of Ferric with over 40 patents issued and 15 publications on Integrated Voltage Regulators. Noah leads Ferric with focus on business development, marketing and new technology development. Noah previously worked at AMD R&D Lab where he developed Integrated Voltage Regulator (IVR) technology.
Tell us about your company
Ferric is a growth stage technology company that designs, manufactures, and sells chip-scale DC-DC power converters called Integrated Voltage Regulators (IVR) which are critical for powering high performance computers. Ferric’s line of IVR products are complete power conversion and regulation systems that can be placed especially close to a processor or even within processor packaging to provide significant reductions in system power consumption and area while enabling improved performance. Systems that employ Ferric’s IVRs realize 20%-70% reduction in solution footprint and bill of materials costs with a 10%-50% improvement in energy efficiency. Ferric’s IVR products are being adopted to power next generation Artificial Intelligence (AI) processors where Ferric’s market leading power density and efficiency provides a direct advantage in processor performance.
What problems are you solving?
The intense demand for high performance computing spurred by recent breakthroughs in AI has driven steep increases in datacenter power consumption. The latest generation of processors developed for AI training use liquid-cooling and require more than 1000 Watts per processor, which conventional power supplies struggle to provide, resulting in inefficiency and loss of performance. Soon, processors will consume more than 2000 Watts per processor, further straining conventional power delivery solutions. In addition to performance issues, traditional power solutions take up vasts amounts of PCB real estate. Doubling the size of power solutions as power demand doubles is untenable. Next-generation systems must integrate power with significantly better power density, system bandwidth and energy saving capability, which is only possible with IVR solutions such as Ferric’s.
What application areas are your strongest?
High-performance processor applications are among our strongest because of the urgent requirements for powering AI workloads. Our products can achieve a solution current density exceeding 4A/mm2 with conversion efficiency better than 94% and regulation bandwidth approaching 10MHz. The unique combination of density, conversion efficiency and regulation bandwidth available from Ferric’s IVRs allows high performance processors to receive more power with less waste. Other applications for Ferric’s IVRs include FPGAs and ASICs, which tend to have high supply counts and therefore realize dramatic reductions in board area by integrating voltage regulators into the package.
What keeps your customers up at night?
What keeps our customers up at night is the prospect that their processors will underperform because their power solution does not provide enough power when it’s needed. AI workloads are pushing processor power demands like never before and a company’s competitiveness may boil down to whether they can reliably and efficiently deliver enough power to their processors.
What does the competitive landscape look like and how do you differentiate?
Ferric’s technology team consists of experts who have been leading the integration of switched-inductor power converters with CMOS for the past 15 years. Ferric’s technology is 10x denser than the next closest option on the market and is readily available to customers in convenient, chip-scale IVR modules or through Ferric’s partnership with TSMC. Ferric’s patented magnetic inductor and power system technology enables a remarkable improvement in IVR efficiency and integration density, delivering a substantial advantage to Ferric’s customers.
What new features/technology are you working on?
Greater power density, higher conversion efficiency, faster regulation bandwidth and better power integration options. High-performance computing systems are continuously pushing integration and power levels, so we must do the same with our IVRs. We are accomplishing this by driving our designs and magnetic composites even further while working closely with our customers to integrate our products with their systems.
How do customers normally engage with your company?
Similar to other power module vendors, we provide datasheets, models, eval. boards and samples to facilitate our customers’ evaluation and adoption of Ferric’s IVRs. Our applications team provides direct support to customers as they progress through evaluation, adoption and production. We are experienced in supporting our customers in a wide variety of ways. In addition to supporting our devices, we do power integrity analysis for customer systems, perform layout and integration scheme assistance, and offer thermal solutions options and support for numerous integration methods, ranging from PCB attach to co-packaging with the processor.
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