With mega deals for mergers and acquisitions took place in the past year, would innovations be stalled? Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation said if you look at semiconductor end sales in this century, we have only seen a 5% compounded annual growth rate. It’s clearly showing signs of an end market that is very large and very mature and in the same time, the cost for a new facility or new product has skyrocketed.

Market Watch
December 23, 2015
By: Therese Poletti
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Recognized as an EDN Magazine Hot 100 Product for 2015, EPC2035/36 low-priced gallium nitride FETs give better performance, smaller size, and lower cost than an equivalent silicon solution. This is the third time in 5 years that EPC’s eGaN technology has been recognized as a HOT 100.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — December 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation, (www.epc-co.com) the leader in enhancement mode gallium nitride FET technology, announces that its EPC2035 (60 V) and EPC2036 (100 V) high frequency, low-priced eGaN FETs have been recognized with inclusion in the EDN list of 100 Hot Products for 2015.

In 2014, data centers in the United States consumed approximately 100 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. To add insult to injury, the power needed to support this rapidly growing demand comes from an electrical grid that is wildly inefficient and is based on infrastructure that was created, in large part, more than a century ago. Just how significant is this waste? It turns out that the power grid supplies 150W of power to meet the demands of a digital chip that may need only 100W. Moreover, the amount of wasted energy is even greater because every watt of power lost through power conversion is transferred into heat. And it is necessary to remove that heat from the server farm by expensive and energy-intensive air conditioning. It takes about 1W of air conditioning to remove 1W of power losses, effectively doubling the inefficiency of this power conversion process.

New materials have emerged that can convert electricity more efficiently and at a lower cost. By eliminating the inefficiencies in this final stage in the server farm power architecture we can realize a direct saving of 7 billion kWh per year. This is doubled when air conditioning energy costs are added, bringing the total to about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by servers in the US alone. The cost savings are also significant. At the average cost of $0.12 per kWh, that’s a savings of $1.7 billion annually, which does not include the additional savings in system cost resulting from fewer power converters and air conditioners.

Datacenter Dynamics
December 15, 2015
By: Alex Lidow
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The Second Edition of the Wireless Power Handbook is an updated and expanded guide to designing efficient amplifiers for a wireless power transfer systems taking advantage of the superior performance of gallium nitride power transistors.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – December 2015 – Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (www.epc-co.com) announces the publication of the Second Edition of the Wireless Power Handbook. This edition is a practical engineering handbook designed to provide power system design engineers valuable experiences and points of reference critical to understanding and designing highly efficient wireless power systems using gallium nitride transistors.

EPC CEO and Co-Founder Alex Lidow comments on Tsinghua's $47B "Warchest" and quest to be #3.

Investor's Business Daily
by: Allison Gatlin
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Mr. Cataldo to direct EPC’s global sales and marketing organization and assist customers in adopting eGaN^® FETs and Integrated Circuits for leading-edge power conversion systems

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.—December 2015 — To support its accelerating growth, Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) is proud to announce that Nick Cataldo has joined the EPC leadership team as senior vice president of global sales and marketing. Mr. Cataldo has over 35 years of marketing and sales operation experience within the semiconductor industry. His primary responsibilities at EPC are creating and implementing sales and marketing strategies to achieve the company’s global sales objectives.

EPC CEO & Co-Founder, Alex Lidow on Bloomberg Radio discusses the flurry of M&A in the semiconductor space and how GaN is displacing silicon across the enterprise.

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Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) CEO Alex Lidow tells Light Reading he might be within two years of a breakthrough that would upend the entire semiconductor market: CMOS logic implemented in gallium nitride (GaN).

Light Reading
By: Brian Santo
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DC-DC “brick” converters are familiar to many engineers, and have wide usage in telecommunications, networking, data centers, and many other applications. This is due in large part to adoption of a common footprint defined by the Distributed-power Open Standards Alliance (DOSA) and generally accepted input/output voltage ranges. These converters provide isolation and voltage step-down, and have become increasingly sophisticated, with features that enable advanced system optimization and control.

EDN Network
November 23, 2015
By: John Glaser
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“The semiconductor industry will become one where there are a lot of large corporations and smaller companies will, in effect, be outsourced R&D, much like the pharmaceutical sector,” says Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion. He says in this scenario Qorvo Corporation and Intersil Corp. could become attractive targets.

Lidow, however, believes consolidation may bring a dark ages to innovation in the semiconductor industry.

Forbes
November 23, 2015
By: Antoine Gara
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The future is clear, but, when that future is going to happen and who is going to benefit? That's not clear. I think the adoption rate is anybody's guess.

Investors Business Daily
November 17, 2015
By: Allison Gatlin
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Silicon, the stuff upon which the Valley was built, is maxing out. The future, according to some, belongs to gallium nitride. What is it, and what does it mean?

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Semiconductor firms have announced $100.6 billion in mergers and acquisitions this year. Chip makers have long used acquisitions to obtain new technology. But many recent deals resemble consolidation waves in older industries, motivated mainly by trimming costs in areas like manufacturing, sales and engineering.

Wall Street Journal
October 18, 2015
By: Don Clark
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According to a new research publication by Transparency Market Research, the global GaN semiconductor devices market that was valued at US$379.82 million in 2012, is estimated to reach US$2,203.73 million by the end of 2019, registering growth at a remarkable CAGR of 24.6% during the forecast period of 2013 to 2019.

Industry Today
October 14, 2015
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The combination of lower on-resistance, faster switching speeds, lower thermal impedance, and smaller physical size of eGaN FETs continues to raise the bar for power transistor performance. As GaN technology matures, not only does the performance of these transistors rapidly improve, but significant reductions in cost are also realized. Not only will GaN devices continue to enable new applications, they will replace silicon power transistors in cost-sensitive applications as well. As a matter of fact, the first signs of this happening are already here.

Power Systems Design
By: Johan Strydom, Ph.D.
September 26, 2015
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100 volt, 1 amp, 550 milliohm EPC2037 enhancement-mode gallium nitride power transistor is driven directly from a digital drive and delivers high frequency switching for exceptional performance in wireless charging Class-D and Class-E amplifier applications.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – October 2015 – Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (www.epc-co.com) introduces the EPC2037 as the newest member of EPC’s family of enhancement-mode gallium nitride power transistors (eGaN^® FETs).

In recent years, the acceleration predicted by Moore’s law has slipped. However, silicon could give way to new materials for making faster and smaller transistors.

New York Times
By: John Markoff
September 26, 2015
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Alex Lidow, scion of an engineering dynasty, thinks the essential material at the heart of the tech industry needs to change. Lidow, 60, is currently head of a company called Efficient Power Conversion, and is one of the tech world’s loudest advocates for making transistors and semiconductors from gallium nitride. Silicon is traditionally used for the transistors and semiconductors on which the technology industry relies. This is an amazingly lucrative business: according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, which represents U.S.-based firms, the worldwide semiconductor industry was responsible for approximately $335.8 billion of sales last year alone.

Fast Company
September, 2015
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EPC’s DC-DC Conversion handbook is a guide showing how to achieve increased efficiency and power density in Datacom equipment and other power conversion applications using GaN power transistors.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – September 2015 – The demand for information is growing at unprecedented rates and society’s insatiable appetite for communication, computing and downloading, is driving this demand. With emerging technologies, such as, cloud computing and the internet of things, not to mention the 300 hours of video being loaded to YouTube every minute, this trend for more and faster access to information is showing no signs of slowing…and this is the challenge that motivated the writing of this practical engineering handbook – DC-DC Conversion: A Supplement to GaN Transistors for Efficient Power Conversion.

120 volt, 60 milliohm EPC2110 dual enhancement-mode gallium nitride power integrated circuit delivers ultra high frequency switching for exceptional performance in wireless power transfer Class-E amplifier applications.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – September 2015 – Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (www.epc-co.com) introduces the EPC2110 as the newest member of EPC’s family of enhancement-mode gallium nitride integrated circuits.