Two space travel related stories hit my desktop this week; one that rapidly generated major international headlines and one that slid very quietly onto my email screen.

The headline-hitter was the successful launch of Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket with its payload of a Tesla sports car, complete with a dummy driver at the wheel. The second was about Gallium Nitride technology that would be suitable for space applications.

Electro Pages
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SL70040SEH Low Side GaN FET Driver Powers ISL7002xSEH GaN FETs in Launch Vehicle and Satellite Power Supplies

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the space industry’s first radiation-hardened, low side Gallium Nitride (GaN) field effect transistor (FET) driver and GaN FETs that enable primary and secondary DC/DC converter power supplies in launch vehicles and satellites, as well as downhole drilling and high reliability industrial applications. These devices power ferrite switch drivers, motor control driver circuits, heater control modules, embedded command modules, 100V and 28V power conditioning, and redundancy switching systems.

Business Wire
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Best design practices utilize the advantages offered by eGaN FETs, including printed circuit board (PCB) layout and thermal management. As GaN transistor switching charges continue to decrease, system parasitics must also be reduced to achieve maximum switching speeds and minimize parasitic ringing typical of power converters.

Power Electronics
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Developers are hard at work on the machine learning necessary for safer and more-autonomous vehicles. But all the AI in the world won’t be enough if the car relies on inadequate sensors. That was clearly demonstrated in one fatal Tesla crash that occurred in part because the car’s camera didn’t correctly identify an oncoming truck. To ensure smart vehicles have a reliable model of surrounding objects — particularly the ones the cars identify as “threats” — most rely on one or more lidars, or laser-based remote sensors.

Extreme Tech
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LAS VEGAS — Once again the marathon that is CES is drawing to a close. Four days of trade show plus two days of media events. All sprawled across five miles of Las Vegas in some insane number of hotels and conference venues. As usual, I stuck it out so you don’t have to. Here are some of the images that struck me as interesting, weird, or just plain worth remembering:

Extreme Tech
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Wireless power, the ability to deliver electricity to gadgets without plugging those gadgets into a cable, is a hotbed of innovation at the moment. The dominant standard, called “Qi,” is ever under attack from other efforts.

This week saw interesting developments from Energous (WATT), which aims to transfer power via radio frequency transceivers, with limited results so far, and some controversy about its business.

There are other contenders. On Wednesday in Las Vegas, during the Consumer Electronics Show, I met with Alex Lidow, who is founder of a privately held chip company EPC of El Segundo, California.

Barron's
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This article takes a deep dive into lidar technology. It explains how the technology works and the challenges technologists face as they try to build lidar sensors that meet the demanding requirements for commercial self-driving cars.

The bottom line is that while bringing lidar costs down will take a significant amount of difficult engineering work, there don't seem to be any fundamental barriers to bringing the cost of high-quality lidar down below $1,000—and eventually below $100. That means the technology—and ultimately, self-driving vehicles that depend on lidar—should be well within reach for ordinary consumers.

Ars Techinca
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如果要無線充電得以普及， 無線充電系統必需從小型充電墊發展成為大面積無線電源。這就需要磁共振系統的線圈、系統架構及功率放大器各方面的基本改變。基於氮化鎵元件的放大器已經被證明為可以在廣闊的負載範圍內發送60 W功率至發射線圈並實現超過90% 的效率。

作者：張遠哲及Michael A. de Rooij
Power Electronics Europe雜誌
2017年11月/ 12月刊
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Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, talks to Leo Laporte about Gallium Nitride, and how it is being used to create the next generation of microchips and wirelessly power the world.

This Week in Technology
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宜普電源轉換公司首席執行官兼共同創辦人Alex Lidow展示大面積無線充電技術如何傳送電源。

Digital Journal
2017年9月18日
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Nextbigfuture訪問了EPC公司的首席執行長Alex Lidow。 EPC公司是製造氮化鎵電晶體的領導廠商，目前帶領業界開啟無線充電新時代。在5至10年內，我們將有可能看到全屋或辦公大樓從採用昂貴的電源線改為在廣泛地方採用無線充電解決方案。

NextBigFuture
2017年9月9日
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The year is 2022. You sit down at your office desk, back from Ikea with your new lamp. You take it out of the box, place it on the table, and it illuminates the workspace immediately. You then take your MacBook out of your backpack, place it to the right of the lamp, and it starts charging instantly. It sounds unreasonable to think that all this could become reality in just a few years. But behind closed doors, this technology already exists.

“A couple of months ago, we demonstrated an entire table top where everything on it was powered wirelessly,” Alex Lidow, CEO of EPC, tells Inverse. “A lamp, computer monitor, computer, cell phones being charged… all sorts of stuff.”

Inverse Innovation
August, 2017
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Since Nikola Tesla first experimented with wireless power during the early 1900s, there has been a quest to “cut the cord” – and go wireless. Today’s applications for wireless power undoubtedly extend far beyond Tesla’s wildest imagination, as we now have the ability to wirelessly charge cell phones, power tools, and even buses while at their scheduled stops, not to mention airborne drones while flying. However, despite strong consumer and business demand for wireless charging, power cords still reign. What explains the lag in our ability to power all of our electronic devices and appliances wirelessly?

ITProPortal
August 2, 2017
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During our lifetime furniture design has been primarily dictated by style. However, as we become gradually more entangled in the internet of things, function is going to become increasingly important.

Future of Everything
July 20, 2017
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GaN power element technology has found its way into a major application in the industry with the release of the Dell Latitude computer using the AirFuel standard.

Planet Analog
July 19, 2017
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EPCが無線充電用途向けeGaN FETとパワーキットに関するデータ一覧

日経BP社
2017年6月15日
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這位在40年前成為博士的科學家曾為世界節省了15%電量，如今他正繼續自己的創新之旅，為人類找到了矽的全新替代材料。

我父親常常教導我：一個人的真正價值，是通過他對社會所作出的貢獻來衡量的。 1975年我進入研究生院學習，那時我的興趣在半導體領域，並且認為我對社會最大的貢獻，就是找到可以替代矽的半導體材料。我的研究生畢業課題從圍繞砷化鎵展開，但是直到在1977年獲得博士學位後，我才發現，作為一種半導體材料，砷化鎵受其基本材料特性所影響，它的應用前景非常有限，於是我轉而專注於研究如何製造出更好的矽基器件。

財富中文網 (Fortune China)
2017年6月15日
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業界資深技術專家Alex Lidow的使命，是帮助您對電子設備供電而不需使用電源線`。

Seeker
2017年6月
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With the current maturity of Class-D audio amplifier architectures, amplifier fidelity and efficiency limitations are primarily at the device level. Silicon MOSFETs have been evolving for almost forty years, and their progress towards a perfect switch has slowed dramatically. There are some fundamental characteristics of MOSFETs that degrade sound quality and efficiency. In 2010, the enhancement mode Gallium nitride (GaN) power FET was introduced by Efficient Power Conversion (EPC), providing a large step towards the perfect switch.

Audio Engineering Society
May 11, 2017
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During last week's PCIM Europe event in Nuremberg, Germany, direct 48V-to-1V power conversion architectures were a significant topic. “The use of GaN switches in 48V-to-1V direct dc-dc converters can improve system performance by 30%, compared with today’s best silicon-based designs,” commented Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion.

PowerPulse
May 31, 2017
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