Lineage Power Introduces Fully Regulated Bus Converters; Said to be in Compliance with Recent Court Injunction
Lineage Power has introduced the Barracuda family of digitally controlled, fully-regulated bus converters for dc-dc intermediate bus architectures. The Barracuda™ series delivers digital power communication and control in standards-based eighth-brick and quarter-brick DOSA footprints.
According to Lineage, power design engineers can deploy the new Barracuda modules in existing power designs as DOSA-compliant, drop-in upgrades for unregulated and semi-regulated bus converters challenged by recent industry-wide intellectual property issues. As part of the Lineage Power Total Efficiency™ architecture, the new Barracuda modules deliver efficiency of 96 percent and are priced comparable to current semi-regulated bus converters to encourage rapid adoption in new and existing product designs.
"The Barracuda digital bus converters give global OEMs the confidence to leverage the energy efficiency benefits of digital power control with cost-effective multi-sourcing options for supply chain efficiency," said Niklas Fallgren, Vice President and General Manager of Lineage Power’s Embedded OEM division. "Our backwards-compatible, standards-based digital solutions enable our OEM customers to power innovation in their new product designs, lower costs, reduce risks, and meet their customers’ needs for today’s accelerated design cycle."
The Barracuda QBVW series is a digitally controlled drop-in alternative for unregulated and semi-regulated bus converter products. The PMBus™ Rev.1.1-compliant Barracuda QBDW series features built-in I²C digital communications to enable design engineers to leverage the benefits of both digital communication and control. Both members of the Barracuda family are designed to provide a 9.6-12Vdc intermediate bus voltage after which multiple, low voltage rails are generated using additional Point of Load (POL) converters such as DLynx™. This architecture is designed to power silicon devices such as processors and memory devices on circuit boards using POL converters. Barracuda converters can also be utilized for other applications requiring a fully-regulated output voltage in distributed power architectures deployed in networking, Power over Ethernet (PoE), computing and data storage devices.
New synchronization features, active load sharing and differential remote sense are combined with a digital PMBus interface that supports a wide range of commands to both control and monitor the Barracuda modules with a full range of protections and warnings, digital on/off, trim, margin, power good, rise time adjustment, and input under voltage lockout.
Lineage Power Barracuda samples are available now. Pricing starts under $47 per unit for OEM quantities.
The release of the Barracuda line comes on the heels of a court decision issued yesterday in favor of SynQor and its request for an injunction against several power electronics companies, including Lineage Power.
In relation to the injunction, Trent Waterhouse, VP of Marketing for Lineage Power, issued the following statement:
"Not much we can say to the press other than we are complying with the judge’s order for an injunction and that we are exercising any and all means possible to support our customers by offering non-infringing alternatives, such as the Barracuda fully regulated bus converter series, announced today. As detailed in our 23 DEC statement, Lineage Power is committed to vigorously defending our intellectual property portfolio; and we will continue to pursue all avenues of recourse, including post-trial motions and appeals."
Waterhouse added, "We are adding the following statement to our products involved in the injunction:
"This product is affected by a Permanent Injunction entered by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division in Civil Action No. 2:07-cv-00497-TJW-CE. As set forth in that Order, certain acts associated with this product are prohibited. This Product is Not for Sale in, Use in, or Importation into the United States."
