AI accelerators and 800 V data-center rails have pushed core currents from tens of amps to the multi-kiloamp range in a few product cycles — and they’re still climbing. Today Picotest’s Load Slammer platform covers that climb up to 3,000 A. The number keeps going up, and so does ours.
But current alone isn’t the whole story. The load transitions these rails have to survive are collapsing into the nanosecond and below, in less and less board space, under tighter thermal budgets. A test tool that delivers high current slowly doesn’t tell you the truth about how a power delivery network behaves in the rack — it tells you how it behaves in a much gentler world that doesn’t exist anymore.
That’s the gap conventional load slammers run into. Many remain limited by microsecond-class transitions, restricted duty cycle, and high-inductance interconnects — fine for yesterday’s rails, not for a GPU or AI accelerator socket. Rise time is bandwidth: a sub-nanosecond edge delivers hundreds of MHz of stimulus bandwidth, versus under 1 MHz for a microsecond-class step — roughly 100x less. Validate a fast rail with a slow stimulus and the bench lies to you.
Picotest’s GaN-based platforms close that gap across the entire range a modern power path needs testing at:
100 mA closed-loop injectors — for chip- and VRM-level supplies, where the transient starts.
Browser-probe steppers, 1–50 A — low-inductance, touch-to-test, for board and system-level PDN validation, up to a water-cooled head for sustained 100% duty-cycle thermal testing.
The S2000 in-socket board, up to 3,000 A — in 1-A steps, in the ASIC’s own socket, for realistic AI and data-center load emulation.
That range unlocks testing conventional loads can’t do: rail-to-rail crosstalk, load-line validation, TDP/thermal characterization under continuous duty cycle, and dynamic loading that actually resembles what a GPU or AI accelerator does to its rail in production.
The current is going to keep climbing — 3,000 A today, higher tomorrow. Picotest’s roadmap is built to climb with it, sub-nanosecond, at every stop from injection to full current emulation.
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