Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) has dealt another blow to the silicon MOSFET power element with its Generation 5 (Gen5) process enhancements, bringing improved performance while decreasing the cost of off-the-shelf Gallium Nitride transistors and shrinking their die size and board footprint.

Alex Lidow, EPC’s CEO/co-founder, and his team have once again put their expertise to work in their efforts to provide designers these unique power solution choices for new markets that need performance beyond what silicon devices have been able to provide. The team’s technical capabilities and in-depth understanding, even into the quantum mechanics of the process, are enabling both better performance as well as shrinking the size and cost of their solutions

EDN
March 15, 2017
Read article

The $330 billion silicon chip industry is the foundation of everything electronic. But it’s slowing down as it reaches a new level of maturity that is prompting a bunch of mergers and acquisitions.

That’s why Alex Lidow, an industry pioneer and the chief proponent of an alternative material to silicon — gallium nitride (GaN) — feels like his time has come. His company, Efficient Power Conversion (EPC), is unveiling a new generation of eGaN chips that are half the size of previous chips and have significantly higher performance.

VentureBeat
March 15, 2017
Read article

Semiconductor revolutionary Dr. Alex Lidow, CEO & CO-Founder of Efficient Power Conversion (EPC), on why the QCOM-NXP acquisition could be a culture clash.

Bloomberg
Press play button to listen to interview

The world around us will soon be engulfed by machines that affect our living spaces, our bodies, and our experience of light and sound, powered by a novel combination of semiconductors and miniature engines. Tasks as basic as charging a smartphone or cooking an egg—and as complex as scanning for colon cancer or powering flying drones on long journeys—stand to be transformed.

Barron's
October 22, 2016
Read article

On November 3rd, IEEE PELS will offer a webinar by Alex Lidow and Michael de Rooij discussing the design and PCB manufacturing methods for using chip-scale packaged GaN power devices.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif.— October 2016 — Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) experts on the design and use of gallium nitride transistors will conduct a one-hour webinar sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) on November 3rd from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM (EDT).

Tesla Motors is releasing a new version of Autopilot overnight, adding features the company says will make it safer and more reliable. Investigators are probing what role the self-driving system played in a pair of fatal crashes in Florida and China.

Silicon Beat
September 21, 2016
Read article

The chief technology officer of a technology supplier that enables Tesla's semi-autonomous Autopilot driving technology believes the carmaker is pushing the safety envelope too far.

"It is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner," Amnon Shashua, CTO and executive chairman at Israel-based Mobileye NV, told Reuters Wednesday.

Computerworld
September 15, 2016
Read article

In the future, self-driving cars will require laser-based sensing tech, and these systems will need new types of high-speed transistors and chips that can beat out silicon.

That’s the assertion of Alex Lidow, a Stanford PhD physicist, entrepreneur, and CEO and founder of Efficient Power Conversion (commonly called EPC), a company based in El Segundo, Calif. that makes transistors and chips out of a material that operates more quickly and efficiently—and costs less than silicon.

Fortune
September 8, 2016
Read article

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
Press play button to listen to interview

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
Listen to Interview

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
Read article

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
View video

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
View video

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
Read article

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.

View video

Alex Lidow is a man on a mission. His Southern California company, Efficient Power Conversion or EPC, is using Gallium Nitride (GaN) chips instead of silicon for exciting applications, from wireless power charging and 4G LTE to augmented reality and autonomous vehicles.

But can this hot new technology ultimately displace the ubiquitous silicon chip in a $300 billion semiconductor market?

Fox Business
By Steve Tobak
March 18, 2016
Read article

After getting his PhD in applied physics at Stanford, Alex Lidow spent 30 years at International Rectifier (IR), a publicly traded chip company founded by his father Eric Lidow back in the 1940s.

Alex pioneered IR’s power management technology, co-authored the core-patents on which its business was built, became co-CEO with his brother, Derek, in 1995, and ran the company solo after Derek left to found market research firm iSupply in 1999.

Entrepreneur
By: Steve Tobak
March, 2016
Read article

The demand for information in our society is growing at an unprecedented rate. With emerging technologies, such as cloud computing and the Internet of Things, this trend for more and faster access to information is showing no signs of slowing. What makes the transfer of information at high rates of speed possible are racks and racks of servers, mostly located in centralized data.

EEWeb
Alex Lidow, Ph.D., David Reusch, Ph.D., and John Glaser, Ph.D.
March, 2016
Read article on page 24

Award Recognizes Innovation in Power Device Technology for Enabling the Commercialization of GaN

EL SEGUNDO, Calif, — January 2016 — Today, Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) announced that its CEO Alex Lidow was selected as the recipient of the 2015 SEMI Award for North America for the innovation of power device technology, enabling the commercialization of GaN. Dr. Lidow is being honored for his work in the area of Process and Technology Integration.

With the backdrop of slower global economic growth and expected higher interest rate in 2016, Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation opines that companies looking for late-stage financing will see a greater emphasis on fundamentals such as revenue, margin and cash flow, and a lower emphasis on less-tangible metrics, such as the size of an audience without strong monetization.

Los Angeles Business Journal
December 23, 2015
By: Garrett Reim
Read article