Tau Unveils Ion Power Electronics Platform at CES 2026
Tau, a pioneer in advanced electrification, unveiled Ion™, its software-defined power electronics platform, at CES 2026. Ion scales across mobility, energy, industrial systems and the grid. It enables high-performance power conversion for charging systems, motor drives, data centres and distributed energy applications.
Tau-Ion Software-defined power electronics
Ion introduces a modular, multi-layer architecture that tightly integrates advanced hardware with firmware and scalable software libraries. This platform approach enables developers and partners to deploy power converters with greater flexibility. It also lowers system costs, boosts performance, and shortens time-to-market compared with 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 specialised 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."
Tau has shown that Ion-based converters can exceed 99% efficiency. They also deliver meaningful system-level performance gains and reduce overall converter size and cost. Ion achieves these results by tackling key power-electronics challenges through standardised building blocks.
"Each Ion module abstracts the underlying power electronics hardware, integrated 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, which significantly reduces development time, cost, and risk."
At CES 2026, Tau publicly unveiled Ion systems that can dynamically reconfigure. The systems bring individual modules online and take them offline to create adaptable, shared power resources. Example use cases include N-in-1 architectures for automotive platforms and reconfigurable, self-healing microgrids for intelligent energy and infrastructure applications.
Tau is actively partnering with customers across multiple industries to develop and deploy solutions on the Ion platform. These collaborations accelerate electrification and support the integration of next-generation energy resources.
Ion supports cross-industry power conversion in charging systems, motor drives, data centres, solar, distributed energy resources and grid-connected infrastructure. It uses a software-defined architecture that decouples application functionality from hardware. This approach lets teams deploy and update new power converter use cases through software rather than hardware redesign.
Ion also uses modular, scalable building blocks. Teams can standardise on modules, reconfigure them, or bring them online and offline dynamically. This flexibility supports a wide range of power levels and system architectures. Tau has demonstrated industry-defining converter efficiency, with efficiencies exceeding 98-99%. This performance reduces losses, including under partial loads, improves thermal performance and lowers operating costs.
Ion lowers total system costs by addressing key power-electronics challenges at the module level. This design reduces the bill of materials’ complexity, engineering effort, and system-level validation costs. Ion also enables enhanced system designs through advanced waveform generation that reduces electromagnetic interference while improving system-level efficiency by cutting high-frequency switching losses in motor and motion-control applications. Standard hardware and software libraries speed up application-specific development and validation. Real-time networking, coordinated control and built-in diagnostics add system-level intelligence and resilience through fault tolerance, protection and self-healing capabilities in complex systems.