New family of eGaN power transistors offer superior performance, smaller size, and high reliability…at the price of a MOSFET.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.— April 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) announces the 60 V EPC2035 and 100 V EPC2036 eGaN power transistors designed to compete in price, while outperforming silicon. Price, the last barrier to widespread adoption of GaN transistors as silicon MOSFET replacements, has fallen. These products demonstrate that gallium nitride can displace silicon semiconductors and drive the industry back onto the Moore’s Law growth curve.

Alex Lidow, the CEO of Efficient Power Conversion has made it his life’s work to prolong the lifespan of Moore’s Law. How? As Intel and others have found, traditional chip technology which relies on silicon is approaching a ceiling — pretty soon, somebody is going to make a silicon chip that is as cheap and powerful as that material allows. Lidow says he’s found a semiconducting material that is superior to silicon in many ways: gallium nitride (GaN). Both in laboratories and in practice, GaN chips have outperformed silicon in a number of use cases and are also cheaper to manufacture, building on the infrastructure required to make silicon chips while being more resilient and requiring fewer protective elements.

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PandoDaily
April 21, 2015

“Moore’s Law is morphing into something that is about new materials,” said Alex Lidow, a semiconductor industry veteran and CEO of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC). EPC is making a possible silicon replacement, gallium nitride (GAN), which is a better conductor of electrons, giving it performance and power-efficiency advantages over silicon, Lidow said. GAN is already being used for power conversion and wireless communications, and could make its way to digital chips someday. “For the first time in 60 years there are valid candidates where it’s about superior material rather than smaller feature size,” Lidow said.

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Network World
April 17, 2015

Moore’s predictions became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The computing power of chips not only did double every 24 months, they had to double every 24 months or the tech industry — and the economy at large — would suffer dire consequences, stifling innovation and economic advancement.

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re/code
Alex Lidow
April 17, 2015

Chip advances have powered one technology revolution after another: PCs, the Internet, smartphones, smartwatches and, soon, self-driving cars. One company betting its future on III-V materials is Efficient Power Conversion, a 34-person startup led by Chief Executive Alex Lidow. EPC already is seeing steady revenue growth from devices that incorporate a III-V layer made of gallium nitride (GaN). In 2016 or 2017 he expects to adapt the gallium nitride manufacturing process to work for the logic circuits that do the thinking in computer processors. Because of gallium nitride's electrical properties, "you immediately get a thousand times potential in improvement" over conventional silicon, he said.

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CNET.com
April 17, 2015

With the new 100 V EPC2104 eGaN^®half bridge, a system efficiency of a complete buck converter using the EPC2104 is greater than 97% at 22 A switching at 300 kHz, and approaching 97% at 22 A when switching at 500 kHz, achieved when converting from 48 V to 12 V.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — April 2015 — EPC announces the EPC2104, 100 V enhancement-mode monolithic GaN transistor half bridge. By integrating two eGaN® power FETs into a single device, interconnect inductances and the interstitial space needed on the PCB are eliminated, resulting in a 50% reduction in board area occupied by the transistors. This increases both efficiency (especially at higher frequencies) and power density, while reducing assembly costs to the end user’s power conversion system.

New EPC2029 eGaN^® power transistor extends EPC’s power transistor portfolio with high performance, wider pitch chip-scale package for ease of high volume manufacturing and enhanced compatibility with mature manufacturing processes and assembly lines.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.—April 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) announces the introduction of an eGaN FET designed with a wider pitch connection layout. The first in a new family of “Relaxed Pitch” devices, the EPC2029 80 V, 31 A eGaN FET features a 1 mm ball pitch. The wider pitch allows for placement of additional and larger vias under the device to enable high current carrying capability despite the extremely small 2.6 mm x 4.6 mm footprint.

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat profiles Alex Lidow. Silicon chips have had a decades-long run as the foundation for modern electronics. But a new kind of chip, based on the compound material gallium nitride (GaN), promises to unseat silicon because it has higher performance, less power consumption, and lower cost.

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VentureBeat
April 2, 2015

EPC9115 DC-DC bus converter showcases superior performance achieved using eGaN FETS with designated drivers in a conventional fully regulated, isolated eighth brick DC-DC converter topology.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — March 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) introduces the EPC9115, a demonstration design for a 12 V, 42 A output with an input range of 48 V to 60 V. The demonstration board features enhancement-mode (eGaN®) power transistors – the EPC2020 (60 V) and EPC2021 (80V) – along with the LM5113 half-bridge driver and UCC27611 low side driver from Texas Instruments. The power stage is a conventional hard-switched 300 kHz isolated buck converter.

Wireless Power Handbook is a guide to designing an efficient amplifier for a wireless power transfer system, taking advantage of the superior performance of gallium nitride power transistors.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. – March 2015 – Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (www.epc-co.com) announces the publication of 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-based transistors. As a supplement to EPC’s GaN Transistors for Efficient Power Conversion, this new practical guide provides step-by-step analysis on the use of GaN transistors in wireless power transfer. /p> Read more

Enhancement-mode gallium nitride (GaN) transistors have been commercially available for over five years. Commercially available GaN FETs are designed to be both higher performance and lower cost than state-of-the-art silicon-based power MOSFETs. This achievement marks the first time in 60 years that any technology rivals silicon both in terms of performance and cost, and signals the ultimate displacement of the venerable, but aging power MOSFET.

EDN
Alex Lidow
February 18, 2015

At the IEEE APEC 2015 power electronics industry conference, EPC applications experts will make eight technical presentations on GaN FET technology and applications showing the superiority of GaN transistors compared to silicon power MOSFETs.

EPC’s CEO and Co-Founder, Alex Lidow, has spent much of his career developing a superefficient replacement for silicon. Hear his interview on Bloomberg TV.

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Bloomberg TV
February 17, 2015

Ashlee Vance at Bloomberg Business profiles EPC. Silicon has enjoyed some serious staying power. For going on 60 years, it’s been the semiconductor of choice at the heart of transistors—the tiny switches that power the Information Age. A valley has been named after it. Many billion-dollar empires have been forged from it. And now—look away, silicon—it may finally be on the verge of being replaced.

EPC9106 Class-D audio amplifier reference design, using high frequency switching gallium nitride power transistors, demonstrates efficiency enhancement, size reduction and eliminates need for a heat sink while delivering prosumer quality sound.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — February 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) introduces the EPC9106, a reference design for a 150 W, 8 ohm Class-D audio amplifier.

Speaking from an industry perspective, technologies only exist for as long as they yield the benefits and capabilities that promise man a certain advantage. That said, mainstream silicon CMOS technology has afforded the industry immeasurable gains that it has thoroughly benefitted from. The question now is this. Is the sun shining down on CMOS ready to set? An emerging class of GaN power chips is finally knocking down the final cost barriers to their adoption. The chips will enable a wide range of applications from wireless charging to autonomous vehicles and more efficient cellular communications, according to a DesignCon keynoter.

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EETimes Asia
February, 2015

Efficient Power Conversion introduces the EPC2102, 60 V and EPC2103, 80 V half bridges, expanding its award winning family of gallium nitride power transistor products.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — January 2014 — EPC announces the EPC2102, 60 V and the , 80 V enhancement-mode monolithic GaN transistor half bridges.

For the first time in 60 years, a new higher-performance semiconductor technology is less expensive to produce than the silicon counterpart. Gallium nitride (GaN), has demonstrated both a dramatic improvement in transistor performance and the ability to be produced at a lower cost than silicon. GaN transistors have unleashed new applications as a result of their ability to switch higher voltages and higher currents faster than any transistor before. These extraordinary characteristics have ushered in new applications capable of transforming the future. But this is just the beginning.

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EDN
By: Alex Lidow
January, 2015

EPC2027 eGaN^® FET offers power systems designers a 450 V power transistor capable of 4ns rise times for high frequency DC-DC converters and medical diagnostic instruments.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif. — January 2015 — EPC announces the EPC2027, a 450 V normally off (enhancement mode) power transistor for use in applications requiring high frequency switching in order to achieve higher efficiency and power density. Applications enhanced by high voltage higher switching speeds include ultra-high frequency DC-DC converters, medical diagnostic equipment, solar power inverters, and LED lighting.

EPC2100 GaN power transistor single-chip half-bridge products honored with award for innovative advancement in discrete semiconductors.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif — January 2015 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation’s (EPC) enhancement-mode gallium nitride on silicon (eGaN^®) monolithic half-bridge power transistor products have been honored with an Electronic Products’ Product of the Year award.