Chip startup Empower Semiconductor Inc. today announced that it has closed a funding round worth more than $140 million.

Fidelity led the Series D investment. It was joined by Alphabet Inc.’s CapitalG startup fund, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Maverick Silicon, Atreides Management, Socratic Partners, Knollwood and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. The round brings Empower’s outside funding to over $200 million.

San Jose, California-based Empower develops power management chips. Those are the integrated circuits that a server uses to distribute electricity to its components. Such chips are also used for other tasks, most notably protecting the processor from voltage surges.

Traditional power management chips rely on various external components to work. Those parts can take up a significant amount of space, which complicates server development. Empower has developed a new type of power management chip that it says can simplify the workflow.

The company refers to its chips as integrated voltage regulators, or IVRs for short. An IVR removes the need for the external electrical components that traditional power management modules rely on to work. As a result, its surface area is about three times smaller. 

Power management chips are usually implemented on a server’s motherboard alongside the processor and memory. According to Empower, its IVRs’ compact form factor allows them to be integrated directly into the processor. That simplifies system design and leaves more room for other components.

Empower’s technology also offers other benefits. Most notably, the company says that its chips can perform a task known as dynamic voltage scaling, or DVS, faster than the competition.

A server processor’s energy requirements fluctuate based on the task it performs. When the processor switches to a less demanding task, its energy requirements decrease. With DVS, a server can detect such changes and lower the amount of electricity it draws to avoid excessive power usage. The quicker the DVS mechanism decreases the server’s power draw, the less power goes to waste. 

The IVR chips’ DVS mechanism is 100 times faster than the competition, according to the company. As a result, they can reduce power usage by up to 50% in some cases.

Empower sells its IVRs alongside capacitors. Those are miniature batteries that a processor can use to store electricity. Chip designers use them to remove excess energy from processors, speed up computations and perform a range of other tasks.

The company has developed a silicon-based capacitor dubbed ECAP. It says ECAP is the thinnest capacitor on the market, which enables chip designers to shrink their processors. Empower claims that the technology makes it possible to reduce component counts by 40% under certain conditions.

“Over the coming quarters, we’re set to transform the AI market with our revolutionary technology, enabling gigawatts of energy savings and improved throughput of AI platforms across data centers worldwide,” said Empower founder and Chief Executive Officer Tim Phillips.

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