Vicor CEO: IBA and patents, brick by brick

EDN recently discussed with Patrizio Vinciarelli, chairman,president, and CEO of Vicor Power, the company's IBA technology, the evolutionof the company, and how the patent lawsuit Vicor was involved in has affectedthe industry and company over the last four-plus years. What follows areexcerpts of that discussion.

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EDN: The original Intermediate Bus Architecture (IBA) hadits birth in the telecom industry and replaced the older Distributed PowerArchitecture (DPA) model. Moving into the new millennium brought about abigger, more challenging and complex area of focus for clean DC power, computerpower distribution. How has Vicor risen to that difficult challenge?
Vinciarelli: Having pioneered the Full, Half and QuarterBrick DC-DC converter standards of DPA in the '80s and '90s, moving into thenew millennium Vicor developed VIChips for higher performance power systemsusing Factorized Power (FPA), a power component architecture providing moreflexible voltage regulation and current multiplication building blocks. The paper"Electronic packaging of the IBM System z196 enterprise-classserver processor cage," which just became available inthe IEEEXplore digital library,exemplifies the advances in density and efficiency enabled by Factorized Power.

EDN: Now the trend is toward ever decreasing point of load(POL) voltages and sharply rising currents that need to be supplied to modernDSPs, FPGAs, and ASICs while demanding better regulation and lower noise. Whathas Vicor done to provide solutions to the power designers for such systems?
Vinciarelli: Point of load VTM current multipliers using ourSine Amplitude Converter (SAC) topology provide the highest current density andeliminate the need for bulk POL capacitance. By virtue of its high efficiency,fast transient response and low noise performance, our SAC power trainrepresents the ideal engine for demanding low voltage, high current loads.

EDN: Vicor's SAC has actually improved on the existing IBAshortcomings. What can you tell us about where the Synqor lawsuit stands todaywith regard to Vicor and Vicor's counter suit?
Vinciarelli: After SynQor won a jury verdict against makersof look-alike square wave bus converters, Vicor introduced a product line ofBrick Bus Converters using its patented resonant SAC topology.? SAC Bus Converters have essentially half thepower loss and double the density of SynQor converters.? SynQor had previously told the patent officethat resonant converters were outside of the scope of its patent claims, and wewere confident that our product represented a superior and non-infringingalternative to what SynQor was offering.??We also believed that all of the patent claims that SynQor had assertedwere invalid, as the patent office, itself, had preliminarily determined inpending reexaminations of SynQor's patents brought by another party.? Nevertheless, in response to Vicor's productintroduction, SynQor filed suit against Vicor and sought a preliminaryinjunction against Vicor's Bus Converters.?In response to SynQor's request for a preliminary injunction, Vicorintroduced evidence demonstrating non-infringement. SynQor ultimately withdrewits request.???

Although SynQor abandoned its request for a preliminaryinjunction, SynQor has continued to maintain the lawsuit and to threatenVicor's customers and potential customers.?To address this anticompetitive behavior in the marketplace, Vicorasserted counterclaims against SynQor, alleging unfair and deceptive tradepractices and tortious interference with contractual relations.? These counterclaims are based on SynQor'sassertion of non-infringed, invalid, and unenforceable patents to interferewith legitimate competition by Vicor. In addition to filing counterclaims,Vicor has also filed its own re-examination requests on all of the patents thatSynQor has asserted.? In all cases, the patentoffice has initially determined that all of the challenged patent claims areinvalid.?

In view of these developments, we believe that SynQor'sclaim that its patents give it exclusive rights to use IBA has no basis.? The industry is starting to recognize this,and a majority of bus converter customers have recently started deploying Vicorbus converter bricks to gain competitive advantages enabled by their superiorpower density and efficiency.

EDN: How has the Synqor lawsuit affected the power moduleindustry overall?
Vinciarelli: The industry wasblindsided because no one, except for SynQor, believes that SynQor invented IBA.In fact, "SynQor's invention" is an attempt to re-invent history. It was onlyin 2006, years after the inception of IBA, that SynQor first mentioned IBA ordisclosed a power distribution architecture in any of its patents.? No one in the industry or trade press gaveSynQor any credit for IBA because it did not deserve it.?

The initial reaction to SynQor's injunction againstlook-alike square wave bus converters was a wave of redesign activity tosubstitute DC-DC converters. However, presented with the non-infringingalternative of Vicor's Brick Bus Converters, we are seeing that the industry atlarge is coming back to using bus converters.

EDN: Where does the industry go from here regarding IBA ornext generation IBA solutions?
Vinciarelli: To maximize density on line cards, nextgeneration IBA solutions will include use of very high efficiency (> 98%)fixed ratio bus converters from narrow input range power sources. Inapplications utilizing batteries subject to a relative wide range of operatingvoltages, a Controlled Bus Architecture using front end regulators upstream ofnarrow input range fixed ratio bus converters is gaining momentum.