onsemi Targets

onsemi has unveiled its next-generation power technology strategy. On the 21st, the company announced a long-term growth strategy aimed at solving power issues that are constraining the development of AI, electrification, and automation. The company said power problems are becoming more serious as AI, electrification, and automation spread, and it presented a technology strategy and growth roadmap in response.

The challenge onsemi is targeting is power density. The application era is AI, electrification, and automation. Hassan El-Khoury, onsemi’s president and CEO, said power density has emerged as a key engineering challenge for the next 10 years as AI, electrification, and automation expand. He described the ability to deliver more energy in a small space as a condition for innovative leading companies.

The company is pursuing an expansion strategy that applies the power and sensing technologies it has built up in automotive and industrial markets to AI data centers, robots, autonomous systems, and physical AI. Building on its existing automotive and industrial capabilities, the company aims to broaden its reach beyond AI data centers to physical AI such as robots and autonomous systems.

onsemi identified its total addressable market, or TAM, as spanning automotive, industrial, AI data centers, and next-generation applications. It projected the related market size at USD 213 billion in 2030. The company said the market is expected to expand significantly by 2030.

onsemi said the importance of power density is rising with the advancement of AI infrastructure and intelligent systems. Power density refers to the ability to deliver high performance and functionality with less energy and space.

onsemi said next-generation systems must use available energy efficiently, reduce heat generation, and minimize space occupancy while maintaining stable performance even in large-scale environments. It explained that this requires simultaneously optimizing power, thermal management, mechanical structure, and physical space.

However, as power increases, heat also increases. In addition, the smaller the system becomes, the harder it is to dissipate heat externally.

For that reason, trade-offs have traditionally been required among power, size, cost, and thermal performance. onsemi said it has moved to respond with the goal of overcoming these limits.

onsemi presented three major technology platforms rather than a single product. These three platforms cover the range linking devices, intelligent technologies, and integrated technologies.

onsemi presented three platforms and positioned its high-voltage portfolio as the first. The high-voltage portfolio consists of silicon, silicon carbide (SiC), and gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductor product lines. Through this, it offers a range of options in terms of performance, efficiency, power density, and cost.

Within this high-voltage portfolio, onsemi highlighted vertical GaN (vGaN) as a differentiated technology. vGaN is designed to overcome the limits of existing power technologies and targets next-generation high-voltage applications.

The goal of vGaN is to improve efficiency, enhance switching performance, and reduce system size. onsemi emphasized vGaN as a next-generation technology for high-voltage applications.

The second platform is the Treo platform. Treo is an intelligent power technology that goes beyond power conversion to monitor system operating status, respond to variable loads, and protect core functions in real time. onsemi’s plan is to combine highly integrated digital technology and high-voltage technology to improve system precision and adaptability.

onsemi’s third technology pillar is the Embedded Power Platform, or EPP. onsemi views packages not as simple protective shells but as a key element for improving system performance, and presents EPP as a form of integrated technology.

The technology is characterized by using the silicon wafer itself as the package. This makes it possible to integrate and interconnect silicon, SiC, and GaN technologies in a wafer-level architecture, and to integrate FETs, drivers, and controllers into a single package. It also enables simultaneous optimization of electrical, thermal, and mechanical characteristics.

onsemi expects EPP to support the co-design of power systems. It also expects EPP to enable higher power density and system performance while reducing development complexity and time to market.

Another market onsemi sees as important is physical AI. Current AI investment is concentrated on building data center infrastructure for model training and inference, but onsemi expects AI use cases to expand beyond data centers and AI to evolve into machines that interact with the physical world.

Physical AI systems include robots, vehicles, factories, medical systems, and autonomous platforms. These systems must sense and judge real-world environments in real time and link those functions to physical action.

onsemi identified power, sensing, control, and connected computing as the core capabilities that make this possible. Power provides the energy for intelligent systems to operate, while sensing plays the role of recognizing the physical environment.

Control is responsible for turning decisions into actual actions. Connected computing processes and shares information at the edge and supports continuous system adaptation.

onsemi plans to expand the technologies it has accumulated in automotive and industrial applications into the physical AI market. On that basis, it is extending the core of its strategy from supplying individual power semiconductors to system-level co-design.

In addition, onsemi outlined a plan to provide comprehensive solutions across automotive, industrial, AI data center, and physical AI applications. The goal is to reduce customers’ design complexity and improve development speed.

The company said it aims to transfer technologies secured in the automotive sector to other industrial areas and broaden the application of its core technologies across multiple industries. It presented a strategy to apply high-voltage technologies for automotive electrification to industrial energy systems and AI data centers. It also said it would expand sensing and connectivity technologies to automotive, factories, robots, medical systems, and autonomous applications.

Hassan El-Khoury, the CEO, cited the convergence of multiple markets around the same technologies as an opportunity to watch over the next 10 years. He said the ability to deliver power efficiently, sense the environment, and support intelligent decision-making will shape next-generation intelligent devices.

Hassan El-Khoury, the CEO, said onsemi’s technology platforms are focused on solving power density challenges across devices, intelligence, and integration technologies. He said that as AI expands beyond infrastructure into the physical world, the company’s addressable market can widen and growth can continue.

Source: TECHWORLD · Park Gyu-chan
Original: https://www.epnc.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=407210

References

• https://www.epnc.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=407210