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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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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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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eGaN technology is expected to be one of the most important solutions to power efficiency in base station infrastructure for 5G; the peak-to-average ratios will be worse in 5G. Envelope tracking is obvious right now as one way eGaN power transistors will do this, but over the next 3 to 5 years more applications will emerge as eGaN technology progresses.

EDN
Steve Taranovich
July 17, 2015
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EPC garners the attention of MIT Technology Review with its new products targeted for wireless charging applications. Recognizing EPC as a catalyst for jump-starting the market for wireless power systems, the author highlights the need for universally accepted technology standards. He reinforces his position quoting Alex Lidow saying that “…convenience, cost, and efficiency” are all factors needed for broad adoption of any standard…

MIT Technology Review
July 15, 2015
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If expanding industries typically indicate vibrancy, a race to acquire and consolidate is generally reflective of the opposite – a period of slowed growth in mature, often once high-flying categories. And while many industries experience a period of stardom, followed by a sharp and steady decline, we should be extremely worried when they occur in industries that are fundamentally central to our socio-economic vitality.

Forbes
June 26, 2015
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The effort to take advantage of gallium nitride is partly a response to technical and economic factors that have slowed improvement in silicon-based chips.  While companies are still finding ways to fabricate smaller transistors in silicon, reductions in cost and power consumption have been more difficult to achieve. But gallium-nitride circuits can switch on and off much more quickly than silicon and handle higher voltages, said Alex Lidow, EPC’s chief executive. That makes the material particularly good for chores that involve power conversion.

Wall Street Journal
June 22, 2015
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Power conversion involves creating tiny devices that convert electricity from one form to another, enabling all manner of electrical gadgets to function. Till now, silicon had been the preferred medium for power conversion processors, but as that element reaches the limits of its efficiency, attention has focused on new materials.

Los Angeles Business Journal
June 21, 2015
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Last week, El Segundo, Calif.-based Efficient Power Conversion, announced that its offering two types of power transistors made from gallium nitride that it has priced cheaper than their silicon counterparts. “This is the first time that something has really been higher performance and lower cost than silicon,” CEO Alex Lidow says. “Gallium nitride has taken the torch and is now running with it.”

IEEE Spectrum
May 8, 2015
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Alex Lidow, CEO and co-founder of EPC, talks with Alix Palutre of Power Systems Design on a new family of eGaN FETs that has superior performance, smaller size, high reliability, and a low price point. With this announcement, the last barrier to the widespread adoption of GaN transistors as silicon MOSFET replacements has fallen.

Power Systems Design
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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 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

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

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

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.

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