USA - Power-One (www.power-one.com)  and International Rectifier (www.irf.com) announced that they entered into a non-exclusive, worldwide, Field of Use agreement for Digital Power Technology (DPT) patents from Power-One.

Digital Power Technology drives increased system efficiency, improved design flexibility, faster time to market, decreased footprint size and lower system costs. DPT also enables telemetry capability, providing access to
critical information including current, temperature and voltage. Telemetry allows the system to accurately monitor its power consumption and thermal performance, enabling designers to easily engineer key features such as system optimization, fault detection and predictive maintenance features into their end products.

Applications utilizing FPGAs, ASICS, DSPs continue to drive board densities higher, requiring complex power architectures to handle the increasing number of voltage rails and output voltages dropping below 1V. Digital Power
Technology is an extremely attractive solution.

"Power-One is pleased to license its Digital Power Technology to International Rectifier, a market leader in the power-management IC industry, for incorporation into its products," said Edward Carter, VP and GM Industrial and Transportation Business Unit. "With the expanding number of leading power supply and semiconductor  companies partnering with Power-One, we continue to expand the market by providing energy-efficient technologies with increased functionality for our customers."

"It has become clear over the last several years that the leading server, performance desktop, communications and netcom customers are transitioning or have completed their transition from analog power to digital power," said
Deepak Savadatti, Vice President and General Manager IR's Enterprise Power Business Unit. "This agreement validates our strong commitment to continue International Rectifier's leadership in the digital power management space."