In this PSDcast Alex Lidow, CEO and Co-founder of Efficient Power Conversion, talks to Alix Paultre of Power Systems Design about the state of GaN development. Now that the industry has finally embraced what GaN can do with multiple vendors and solutions, we are now seeing real design-ins and products based on GaN power devices.

Power Systems Design
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In this slidecast, Alexander Lidow from EPC describes how the company is leading a technological revolution with Gallium Nitride (GaN). More efficient than silicon as a basis for electronics, GaN could save huge amounts of energy in the datacenter and has the potential to fuel the computer industry beyond Moore’s Law.

insideHPC
July 20, 2016
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EPC’s new value-added partnership with ASD aims to support customer designs from conception to manufacturing of eGaN^® technology-based wireless power charging and other emerging applications.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.— July 2016 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC), Los Angeles-based innovator in gallium nitride (eGaN) technology for replacing MOSFET technology, has joined forces with ASD Technology Limited (ASD), a Hong-Kong-based company delivering best-in-class customer solutions for applications using the latest eGaN technology.

GaN-based FETs are disrupting the power conversion market and are displacing silicon-based metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). Compared to MOSFETs, GaN FETs operate much faster and have higher switching speeds in the smallest possible volume. The promise of GaN is that it can dramatically reduce the size and weight of any power supply. To reach their performance potential, these high-performance GaN transistors need an optimized gate driver.

Peregrine Semiconductor
July 12, 2016
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The first two installments in this series reported in detail on field reliability experience of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) Corporation’s enhancement-mode gallium nitride (eGaN^®) FETs and integrated circuits (ICs). The excellent field reliability of eGaN devices demonstrates stress-based qualification testing is capable of ensuring reliability in customer applications. In this installment we will examine the stress tests that EPC devices are subjected to prior to being considered qualified products.

Planet Analog
Chris Jakubiec
July 9, 2016
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Silicon Valley's namesake raw material faces a promising new rival: gallium nitride (GaN). Some say the newcomer is poised to swarm the $30 billion semiconductor power supply market. It's a market that involves "anything that plugs into a wall" ranging from Apple (AAPL) iPhone chargers to Tesla Motors' (TSLA) luxury electric cars.

Investor's Business Daily
Allison Gatlin
July 2016
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The superior characteristics of eGaN^® FETs and ICs enable a lower cost single transmit amplifier solution that can wirelessly charge devices regardless of the standard used in the receiving device.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — June 2016 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) today announces the availability of a complete demonstration multi-mode wireless power charging kit, the EPC9121. The purpose of this demonstration kit is to simplify the evaluation process of using eGaN FETs and ICs for highly efficient multi-mode wireless power charging systems that can cut across any standard used in the receiving units.

Tuesday I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with Alex Lidow, founder of chip company EPC of El Segundo, California, and something of an luminary of the chip world. Lidow came up with the “power MOSFET,” a device that went on to be the basis of billions in semiconductor sales, in 1977.

His new company, whose initials stand for “Efficient Power Conversion,” proposes replacing silicon, the original basis of the MOSFET, and one of the most prevalent types of semiconductor around, with a different material, Gallium Nitride, commonly abbreviated as GaN — or “eGaN,” as Lidow calls the company’s new, improved form of GaN.

Barron's
Tiernan Ray
June 29, 2016
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There have been several comparisons of eGaN FETs with silicon MOSFETs in a variety of applications, including hard-switched, soft-switched, and high-frequency power conversion. These studies have shown that eGaN FETs have large efficiency and power density advantages over silicon MOSFETs. Here we’ll focus on the use of eGaN FETs in synchronous rectifier (SR) applications and the importance of dead-time management. We show that eGaN FETs can dramatically reduce loss due to dead-time in synchronous rectifiers above and beyond the benefits of low RDS(on)and charge.

Power Systems Design
By: Dr. John Glaser & Dr. David Reusch, Efficient Power Conversion
June 13, 2016
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ANDOVER, Mass.—At the front door of Raytheon's Integrated Air Defense Center, there's a reminder of how big microwave electronics used to be—the original microwave oven. The now ever-present kitchen device was invented after a Raytheon engineer discovered his candy bar melted while he was standing near a magnetron used in a radar system the company was developing. Nearly the size of a refrigerator, the original microwave looks like it would cook a whole lot more than whatever was put within its metal grate, which was meant to contain the microwaves from its magnetron.

Ars Technica
June 9, 2016
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The chip giant's execs are leaving the AirFuel Alliance as the company pivots away from PCs, but WiTricity was showing off Dell notebooks using its wireless charging mat at Computex.

ZDNet
Sean Portnoy
June 8, 2016
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For the last three years, Intel has been stoking demand for PCs ahead of the next big buying cycle with the promise that new machines will be totally wireless. “We carry around a lot of wires,” Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s senior PC exec said at Computex Taipei 2015. “We carry about six cables each for our phones, our tablets and our PCs. We want to get rid of all those cables.”

Forbes
Elise Ackerman
June 6, 2016
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With power converters demanding higher power density, transistors must be accommodated in an ever decreasing board space. Beyond gallium nitride based power transistors’ ability to improve electrical efficiency, they must also be more thermally efficient. This article evaluates the thermal performance of chip-scale packaged eGaN^® FETs and compares their in-circuit electrical and thermal performance with state-of-the-art silicon MOSFETs.

Bodo’s Power Systems
David Reusch, Ph.D. and Alex Lidow, Ph.D.
June 1, 2016
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Senior representatives GaN power manufacturers (EPC, Transphorm, GaN Systems, Infineon and Navitas) presented details of their significant developments in moving the technology into mainstream, volume applications. Based on the information presented in the five talks, there are three significant reasons to expect dramatic growth in adoption of GaN power devices.

Bodo’s Power Systems
June 1, 2016
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MILPITAS, Calif., May 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Intersil Corporation (NASDAQ: ISIL), a leading provider of innovative power management and precision analog solutions, today announced plans to extend its market leading radiation tolerant portfolio to include Gallium Nitride (GaN) power conversion ICs for satellites and other harsh environment applications.

PR Newswire
May 25, 2016
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The number one barrier to improving every electronic product – from smart wearables and laptops to handheld tools and electric cars – is battery technology. The current state-of-the-art in rechargeable batteries, Lithium Ion, has been around for 25 years. As tech goes, that’s pretty old. It’s time for something new, don’t you think?

Fortune
Steve Tobak
May 13, 2016
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Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) Corporation’s enhancement-mode gallium nitride (eGaN^®) FETs and integrated circuits (ICs) are finding their way into many end user applications such as LIDAR, wireless charging, DC-DC conversion, RF base station transmission, satellite systems, and audio amplifiers.

Field reliability is the ultimate metric that corroborates the quality level of eGaN^® FETs and ICs that have been deployed in customer applications. In our first installment we provided an overview of eGaN FET field reliability which included 6 years of volume production shipment, and greater than 17 billion total device hours recorded. A subsequent calculated Failure In Time (FIT – failures in 109 hours) of approximately 0.24 FITs shows excellent field reliability performance to date.

Plant Analog
Chris Jakubiec
May 1, 2016
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Designers using state-of-the-art GaN transistors and IC’s for power conversion now have the use of an interactive web-based parametric selection tool to search for the best possible GaN solution for their given power conversion system.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.—April 2016— Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) announces the implementation of a user-controlled GaN product selector search tool on the EPC website, epc-co.com. Based upon years of EPC customer interactions, this web-based product selector guide provides power system design engineers the following:

Claude Shannon started it all when he wrote “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in 1948 in which he reduced the communication of information to 1s and 0s, essentially binary digits. That theory led to the ability to transmit data without error in the noise-filled environment of the real world. Shannon would have been 100 years old on April 30, 2016.

EDN Network
Steve Taranovich
April 16, 2016
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Freebird Semiconductor and Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) have entered into an agreement whereby Freebird will develop products for use in high reliability space and harsh environment applications based upon eGaN^® power transistors and integrated circuits.

NORTH ANDOVER, MA. — April 2016 — Freebird Semiconductor Corporation, North Andover, Massachusetts announces the signing of an agreement with Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC), the leading provider of enhancement-mode gallium nitride power transistors to develop products for use in high reliability, space, and harsh environment applications based upon EPC’s eGaN^® technology.