Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
“Its technologies deliver industry-leading power conversion efficiency,” said Murata. “Combining them with Murata’s modular technologies will make it possible to provide solutions with high integration and excellent conversion efficiency in not just the telecommunications market, but also the data communication and industrial electronic markets.”
Arctic Sand will continue to develop high efficiency power conversion ICs, added Murata, and now has the benefit of Peregrine’s SOI semiconductor expertise and Murata’s inductors, capacitors and packaging.
Arctic Sand has made bold claims for the efficiency products but, to the knowledge of Electronics Weekly, has not publicly released data sheets or briefs. Its ARC2C0608 LED string driver is said to deliver up to 30V output with up to 94% efficiency and dim with 12 bit resolution (dc or PWM) with linear or logarithmic dimming ramp profiles.
It also states that it is developing a range of buck regulators for notebooks, servers and networking systems.
CTO David Giuliano has a number of patents for switched-capacitor power converters and multi-layer chip packaging.
In general, switched capacitor dc-dc converters can be highly efficient at certain fixed Vin/Vout ratios, and are far less efficient away from those ratios – a situation generally improved by higher switch and capacitor counts. At least one of the patent diagrams includes 16 capacitors and 26 switches.
UPDATE: More on: Arctic Sand’s novel dc-dc converter technology
Peregrine became part of Murata in December 2014, and has since added a power electronics design team. It identified Arctic Sand’s technology as a key component for developing power management solutions, said Murata.
See Arctic Sand at APEC in Florida next week (stand 432).
