Tau, a pioneer in advanced electrification, unveiled Ion™, its software-defined power electronic platform, at CES 2026. Designed for broad applicability and scale across mobility, energy, industrial systems, and the grid, Ion enables high-performance power conversion solutions that are being leveraged for charging systems, motor drives, data centers, and distributed energy applications.
Ion introduces a modular, multi-layer architecture that tightly integrates advanced hardware with firmware and scalable software libraries. This platform approach allows developers and partners to deploy power converters with greater flexibility while achieving lower system cost, higher performance, and faster time to market compared to traditional, application-specific designs.
“Power converters are fundamental to how energy moves around the world, and Ion reinvents how they are built and deployed,” said Wesley Pennington, Founder and CEO of Tau. “Developing conventional power electronics requires significant capital investment and highly specialized expertise, while off-the-shelf solutions force compromises in efficiency, cost, and packaging. Ion delivers a modular, software-defined alternative that enables rapid, cost-effective deployment of highly efficient power systems-accelerating electrification and the deployment of new energy resources across industries.”
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Tau has demonstrated that Ion-based converters can achieve efficiencies exceeding 99%, deliver meaningful system-level performance gains, and reduce overall converter size and cost. These advantages are realized by addressing key power-electronics challenges directly within standardized building blocks.
“Each Ion module abstracts the underlying power electronics hardware, integrating optimized circuitry, low-level controls, filtering, protection, and waveform generation through tightly coupled hardware and firmware,” said Matthias Preindl, Chief Scientist of Tau. “Modules are networked, or interconnected, via a real-time communications layer that enables coordinated control, protection, and diagnostics across the system. At the highest level, applications are defined through software control sets and common libraries, requiring only application-specific functionality to be added and validated, significantly reduces development time, cost, and risk.”
Publicly unveiled at CES 2026, Ion systems can dynamically reconfigure to bring individual modules on- and off-line to create adaptable, shared power resources. Example use cases include N-in-1 architectures for automotive platforms and reconfigurable, self-healing microgrids for smart energy and infrastructure applications.
SOURCE: PRNewswire