How Solid-State DC Protection Works

Speed

Microseconds, not milliseconds.

Ten thousand times faster than moving metal.

Mechanical breaker

over 10 milliseconds

Merge4 solid state

under 5 microseconds

Same trip, same instant

10,000x

faster

The transistor was invented in 1947. The circuit breaker in your basement was patented in 1924, and it still works by physically moving a piece of metal to interrupt current. Transistors went on to transform computing, telecom and data storage. Power never got its turn, because silicon breaks down at high voltage and high current. Silicon carbide and gallium nitride finally solved that. It is why Merge4 reacts in microseconds where mechanical protection takes tens of milliseconds, and why speed here is a change of category rather than a better specification.

Ten thousand times faster

Microseconds instead of milliseconds, on every channel.

Under five microseconds to trip

A mechanical breaker lets current spike for tens of milliseconds first.

Nothing moves, nothing arcs

No arcing and no mechanical wear, because there are no moving parts.

A line, not a band

A trip point right-sized by software, rather than oversized to satisfy a code band.

Physical AI

It has three parts: sensing, learning, and taking action.

The term came out of robotics. We brought it to the power layer. You see the trip before it trips. You see the flicker before it reaches the grid.

Sense

Every node streams voltage, current, temperature, ripple and flicker at 100 kHz, with no extra hardware. Because we are the distribution equipment itself, nothing moves through the facility that we cannot see.

Learn

That data is normalized across the building or the campus and trained on in the cloud, so the models learn how this facility actually behaves rather than how facilities behave on average.

Act

What is learned goes back down to every node, so each one acts on its own, in microseconds, without waiting on an answer from anywhere else. You see the trip before it trips. You see the flicker before it reaches the grid.

Reducing the need for cooling

Once power goes DC, it stays DC.

Power arrives as AC. On its way to a server it is converted back and forth five times, and every conversion throws off energy as heat. That heat has to be cooled, and in most data halls cooling means water. It is also why the room is the size it is. Once power goes DC, it stays DC. We convert twice instead of five times, and the three conversions we remove take their heat, cooling and water with them.

Conversions today

Utility to transformer

UPS input, because batteries are DC

AC to DC

UPS output, back to the building

DC to AC

PDU, a box of breakers

RPP, one more panel

Server rack, because servers are DC

AC to DC

Conversions with Merge4

Utility to transformer

DC UPS

AC to DC

Merge4 PDU, replaces PDU and RPP

Server rack

DC to DC

Once power goes DC, it stays DC. The three conversions we remove take their heat, cooling and water with them.

Heat

Every conversion throws off energy as heat.

AC today

Merge4

Cooling

That heat has to be moved out of the hall.

AC today

Merge4

Water

In most data halls, cooling means water.

AC today

Merge4

From fixed bands to precision lines

A mechanical breaker trips somewhere in a band

Thermal-magnetic breakers trip anywhere inside a shaded zone that spans decades of time at the same current, because bimetallic elements vary with temperature, age and tolerance. There is no way to tighten it, and no way to adjust it without replacing the hardware.

Ours trips on a single line. The slope is programmable, the knee point is programmable, and both can be changed in software while the circuit is live. The reason for the padding is gone, and the megawatts you already paid for become usable.

Legacy mechanical breaker

The problem

Trip uncertainty band

Max boundary

Min boundary

Molded-case breaker, drawn from published min and max boundaries.

Merge4 PM50-D

The solution

Tripping characteristic, programmable

One deterministic trip line on the same axes, changed in software while the circuit is live.

Legacy mechanical breaker

The problem

Trip uncertainty band

Merge4 PM50-D

The solution

Programmable slope

Programmable knee point

Same axes on both charts. Full annotated curves are on the desktop view and in the PM50-D datasheet.

What the platform does

The central nervous system of the facility

Six capabilities on one instrumented layer. None of them are possible on hardware that cannot see itself.

Predictive fault detection

Early fault signatures are recognized in microseconds and protective action starts before damaging current reaches the load. This class of protection has not existed in power infrastructure until now.

Flicker detection and mitigation

AI racks ramp up and down together, megawatts in milliseconds. The platform sees the swing as it emerges and engages capacitors or batteries to smooth it before it reaches the interconnection.

Nuisance trip prevention

Models trained on the facility's own data learn what a real fault looks like here, and adjust trip parameters within safety envelopes so a transient does not take a circuit down.

Power quality monitoring

Noise, harmonics and line impurities are tracked at the protection layer, with configurable thresholds that trigger a response and stand down when conditions normalize.

System optimization

High-resolution data from every node is normalized across the site, so the platform can optimize power flow, reduce congestion and improve reliability at both the local and the system level.

Over-the-air updates

Because it is a computer board rather than a moving part, the platform improves with every deployment. Updates arrive without interruption to the load.

Standards and safety

Power that enables and does not destroy

Built to the standards the industry is converging on. Safety is the floor, not the pitch, and the failure mode is off.

OCP Diablo 400

Compatible with the Open Compute ±400 VDC sidecar specification developed by Google, Microsoft and Meta, delivering up to 1.1 MW directly to AI compute racks.

800 VDC

Rated from 350 to 800 VDC, including the row-scale architecture NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are moving to. There is no zero cross in DC, so mechanical protection is not viable for a data center environment.

No arc flash

Solid-state protection does not arc. The risk category, and the PPE, clearance and arc-rated rooms built around it, are removed rather than reduced.

Isolation on every channel

Galvanic air-gap isolation per channel and a safe-off default on loss of control power.

Hot-swappable

PM50 modules can be serviced in a live row without taking down the load. The technique comes from telecom; doing it at 800 VDC is one of our patents.

Eight patents

Across hot-swappability, flicker mitigation, protection architecture and the certification strategy that lets the platform be deployed.

Pure solid state makes it fast. Physical AI makes it smart.

Microseconds, not milliseconds.

It has three parts: sensing, learning, and taking action.

Once power goes DC, it stays DC.

A mechanical breaker trips somewhere in a band

Legacy mechanical breaker

Merge4 PM50-D

The central nervous system of the facility

Power that enables and does not destroy

Tell us what your power needs to do.