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
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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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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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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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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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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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The company Alex founded in 2007, called Efficient Power Conversion, or EPC, is wholly dedicated to the task of putting GaN in the forefront for use in a variety of things. Wireless power transmission, Class D audio amplifiers, (using a small circuit board, this would produce less heat, and extend battery life on portable systems); and pulsed lasers, or LiDAR (Light Distancing and Ranging), designed to quickly create 3D images useful in mapping and meteorology.

By: Bruce Rogers
Forbes
September 3, 2015
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The cost of electrical power is a key driver of socioeconomic vitality, as it enables us to improve our quality of life and advance new applications and industries. GaN (gallium nitride) has emerged as a displacement technology to the venerable, but aged, silicon solutions that will allow us to stay ahead of our demand for more and more efficient power.

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The proliferation of wireless power products and multitude of wireless power standards for mobile applications is leading to consumer confusion and hindering adoption. This article discuss a multi-mode capable amplifier topology capable of operation at both high (6.78 MHz) and low (100 kHz – 315 kHz) frequencies.

By: Michael de Rooij, Ph.D.
EEWeb – Wireless & RF Magazine
August, 2015
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The trend for electronics is to continually push towards miniaturization while increasing performance. With silicon MOSFET technology fast approaching its theoretical limit, enhancement mode gallium nitride (eGaN^®) FETs from EPC have emerged to offer a step change improvement in power FET switching performance, enabling next generation power density possibilities by decreasing size and boosting efficiency. This article will explore the recommended layout techniques required to fully extract the benefits of EPC’s eGaN FETs.

By: Ivan Chan & David Reusch, Ph.D.
EEWeb –Modern Printed Circuits
August, 2015
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Wireless charging may have a standards battle to contend with, but there’s also a major a measurement problem. The quest for convenient living and energy conservation poses a ‘Ying/Yang’ dilemma living in the age of electronics. This is certainly the case with wireless power transfer technology. This rapidly emerging technology has the promise of “cutting the cord” and displacing the need for AC/DC wall adapters and perhaps eventually wall sockets. The question now is; will wireless power increase our carbon footprint by being less efficient than the traditional plug-in AC/DC wall adapters?” Are some wireless systems more efficient than others? These are two fundamental questions that need to be examined in an energy conscious world governed by energy efficient standards.

EETimes
August 4, 2015
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A new product being developed might make checking for colon cancer as easy as swallowing a pill. The technology is based on a new type of chip from EPC that uses gallium nitride instead of the traditional silicon. CEO Alex Lidow told Quartz that his company’s chips can withstand the high voltage needed by the sensors inside the Check Cap.

Quartz
July 30, 2015
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