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.

In this installment of WiGaN, a differential-mode class-E amplifier for 6.78 MHz loosely coupled resonant wireless power applications is presented. It uses the EPC2037 eGaN^® FET which has a small (0.9 mm x 0.9 mm) footprint and can be driven directly with a logic gate. The amplifier is AirFuel™ Class 2 compatible, capable of delivery up to 6.5 W load power over an impedance range of 70j Ω.

EEWeb - Wireless & RF Magazine
Yuanzhe Zhang, Ph.D., Director of Applications Engineering
Michael de Rooij, Ph.D., Vice President of Applications Engineering
April 12, 2016
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In this short video, EPC's Alex Lidow explains why GaN FETs may make it possible to wirelessly charge a variety of vehicles, including flying drones. Wireless charging circuits employing GaN FETs work at 13.56 MHz, a switching frequency difficult to reach with ordinary silicon FETs. The GaN transistors used are also five to ten times smaller than silicon devices able to handle the same power levels.

Design World
April 11, 2016
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In this short video, EPC's Alex Lidow explains why GaN FETs can comprise circuits able to deliver Lidar resolutions down to a couple inches. Conventional silicon FETs performing the same tasks would be able to resolve images only down to a few feet. The secret is in the super-fast rise and fall times made possible by the GaN FETs.

Design World
April 11, 2016
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Silicon -- the core ingredient in semiconductors and the driving force behind the electronics industry -- is reaching its limit, says Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation. His Los Angeles-based company is investigating the capacity of gallium nitride (GaN) to disrupt the $400 billion (£277bn) silicon industry with its improved powers of semiconducting. "This is the first 
time that there is a semiconductor that is both lower cost and has a higher performance than silicon," Lidow says.

Wired Magazine
Emma Bryce
March 31, 2016
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Emerging applications such as 48V-to-point-of-load (POL), wireless power and USB Type-C had a lot of interest. Google joined the Open Compute Project a few weeks ago and proposed a computer server-rack architecture based on a 48V power-distribution bus to improve overall system efficiency. While the 48V bus has been around for a long time, the push (and challenge) is for high-efficiency 48V-to-POL voltage regulators. EPC showcased TI’s 48V-to-1V EVM which uses the LMG5200 GaN module (driver and FETs), announced at APEC last year, and a new TI analog controller (TPS53632G).

TI E2E Community
Pradeep Shenoy
Mar 28, 2016
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You might have seen some behind-the-scenes tweets from the life of the ECN editor (and News Director) and while a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes an engineer's perspective on a conference is worth a little more.

With that in mind, I reached out to some APEC engineers and attendees to get the lowdown on this year's Applied Power Electronics Conference in Long Beach, CA. We talked about how the show compared to last year, the biggest trends, and how APEC went for their companies.

ECNMag.com
Kasey Panetta
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At this year’s APEC 2016, news about GaN power technology was probably more dominant than at any time in the past. Real product demos using GaN, new product and technology announcements, attention to GaN in the plenary, and other discussions all reinforced the impression that GaN power devices have arrived and the technology is making inroads in the marketplace. One of the tell-tale signs is a slight shift in the discussions, away from what the devices can do to what else is needed to support the design-in of GaN power transistors.

How2Power Today
David Morrison
April 1, 2016
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EPC’s new development boards can be configured as either a buck converter or a ZVS class-D amplifier, demonstrating reduced losses at high frequency using an eGaN FET synchronous bootstrap augmented gate drive.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.— March 2016 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) Introduces the EPC9066, EPC9067, and EPC9068 development boards, which are configurable to a buck converter or as a ZVS class-D amplifier. These boards provide an easy-to-use way for power systems designers to evaluate the exceptional performance of gallium nitride transistors, enabling the designers to get their products into volume production quickly. All three boards feature a zero reverse recovery (Q_RR) synchronous bootstrap rectifier augmented gate driver to increase efficiency at high frequency operation, up to 15 MHz. The boards can produce a maximum output of 2.7 A in the buck and ZVS class-D amplifier configurations. Loss reduction is realized across the entire current range.

Though there are two standards for charging appliances wirelessly, a single circuit can be devised to serve as a charging node for both of them.

Design World
Michael de Rooij, Ph.D., Vice President, Applications Engineering
March, 2016
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Alex Lidow talks about advanced envelope tracking for power management. The ability of an amplifying system to follow the signal and only output the power needed to express it can save significant amounts of energy and improve performance.

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