Better Living Enabled by Better Materials

Gallium Nitride is taking over the world!

2015-12-29T11:16:00.002-08:00

Well, maybe not the entire world but it is getting seriously important! I enjoyed the article at http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/02/move-over-silicon-gallium-nitride-chips-are-taking-over/ from which I paste:

Above: Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

ilicon 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.

That might sound crazy, given the economies of scale for silicon, which has been an almost perfect semiconductor device that can both conduct or block electrical signals. Many people scoffed in early years at alternative materials such as gallium arsenide, which proved to be too expensive. Gallium nitride’s assault on silicon is just in time for the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law, the prediction by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore that chips would double the number of transistors every two years.

If the advocate for gallium nitride, Alex Lidow, is successful, it could be a huge and profitable disruption where consumers win in a big way. We could see cheaper and better electronics products, like wireless power, video game gesture control systems, and self-driving cars that can sense their surroundings.

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Lidow has already changed the chip industry once before in the late 1970s with power MOSFET chips. Those chips resulted in a 15 percent decrease in the global cost of energy. For example, today’s energy efficient home appliances, air conditioners, energy-efficient lighting, and high fuel-economy automobiles are all built with the MOSFET technology that Lidow helped create.

Lidow is now running a five-year-old startup called Efficient Power Conversion, a Los Angeles company that is designing GaN chips. And he’s trying to change the semiconductor industry, one GaN chip at a time. Lidow believes that a new type of semiconductor material, GaN (Gallium Nitride) will soon dominate the $31 billion power management semiconductor market. He has the patents, the supply chain, the customers, and the moxie to do it. His ultimate goal is for GaN to overtake the broader $300 billion semiconductor market.

“This is not a shot at the bow,” Lidow said in an interview with VentureBeat. “This is a shot at the water line of silicon. Other challengers had an advantage in cost or performance, but not both. In my lifetime, there’s never been a case of better performance and better cost at the same time. If Steve Jobs had held up an iPhone in 2007 and said this is faster and cheaper than your old cell phone, there would have been even faster adoption of smartphones.”

He added, “We are offering a radical performance departure. It is 10 times better or more, and we are just at the beginning of Moore’s Law on that. We can build it at a lower cost. What are people waiting for? They are waiting for the risk to go away.”

Above: GaN chips enable cheap wireless charging systems.

Image Credit: EPC

He said the Lidow says that the advantage of gallium nitride is the ability to manufacture it in the same factories that produce silicon chips. In contrast to gallium arsenide, the GaN chips can be processed without expensive machinery or special processes. In fact, the GaNs chips can be made on top of a silicon wafer, without the expensive packaging for protection. The GaN is sealed up on top of the silicon, and the silicon itself is not electrically active.

Packaging for silicon chips can often be half the cost. That packaging remains necessary for silicon chips in order to protect the chips from contamination or short circuits, since the entire device is electrically active. Gallium nitride chips don’t need that same protection. In fact, about 15 years ago, researchers figured out how to grow gallium nitride crystals on top of silicon. By growing a small layer, it isn’t that expensive.

“You don’t need a package,” Lidow said. “Half the cost is gone, and it’s a third of the size of a silicon chip that does the same thing. So you can see how we can make it for a lower cost than silicon.”

At first, as it was working the kinks out, EPC focused on premium markets for its chips. Now it is going after major markets.

“Gallium nitride is a superior semiconductor,” Lidow said. “I don’t think anyone would dispute that. Electrons are much more efficient in GaN than they are in silicon. But like many materials, GaNs in the past has been much more expensive.”

It was relegated to power amplifiers in cell phones, radar systems, and high-end military systems. But Lidow and his cofounders Jianjun “Joe” Cao and Robert Beach say they figured out how to attack both performance and costs.

Lidow had a bit of a difficult start with GaNs. His former chip company, International Rectifier, fired him in 2007 after it found some accounting regularities in a Japanese subsidiary. (Lidow noted that the irregularities were limited to that one subsidiary, and the board thought it could run the company better than him). Then, after he started EPC and hired some International Rectifier employees, the company sued in 2009, alleging he stole employees and trade secrets. The suit was resolved a couple of years ago, and Lidow said, “I hired employees, but I didn’t steal trade secrets.”

After five years of tinkering and lining up manufacturing, Lidow said, “We are exploding on the marketplace this year. Next month, we will introduce a series of products that are higher performance and cheaper in price than silicon. This has not happened in the history of silicon.”

At EPC, Lidow believes that GaN chips can make practical Google’s driverless cars, cool virtual reality, better space exploration, colonoscopy capsules, and high-performance wireless power. That’s a bunch of possible breakthroughs.

But rather than just replace silicon. Lidow is targeting GaN chips at applications that didn’t exist five years ago, such as wireless charging of devices without cords, sensing systems for autonomous vehicles, and high-speed mobile communications.

Above: Cars will use LIDAR systems to sense the environment, using GaNs chips.

Image Credit: EPC

All of the Google self-driving cars and other autonomous vehicles use EPC’s eGaN chips in their Light Illuminated Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) systems, or remote systems which sense the environment around them akin to radar. They illuminate an area with a laser and analyze the reflected light. Google uses LiDAR in the spinning rotors atop its self-driving cars.

With silicon, the chips are slower, so the accuracy is limited to a range of about ten feet, in terms of resolution. By contrast, with GaNs, the devices are accurate to within a couple of inches, Lidow said. You have to be able to detect the reflected light and do it very quickly.

“All of the Google cars use our eGaN chips,” Lidow said. “Car makers are looking to replace all of the sensors on the car with a couple of LiDAR systems.”

LiDAR is expected to become a $1 billion market by 2020, according to researcher Markets and Markets.

GaNs also work well inside wireless charging systems, which are just about to explode on the market and replace power cords. The wireless chargers on the market use either tightly coupled technology, where you have to closely align or plug in a device to its charger, or a loosely coupled one, where the device just has to be near the charger, maybe 15 centimeters or less. The latter is preferable, and Lidow said it is best done with eGaN chips.

Lidow believes that car companies will introduce power-charging systems in cars, with a loosely-coupled connection between a phone and a charging pad. Overall, wireless charging systems are expected to be a $1.7 billion market in 2015, according to market researcher IHS.

“Eventually, we’ll see power cords go away in the house,” Lidow said. “We have range anxiety now with our devices. We need to be untethered completely, and that’s coming.”

Lidow also believes that eGaN chips can be used to provide more efficient power to communications chips, making much more powerful 4G LTE systems. That’s going to lead to some high volume shipments of chips by 2016, Lidow said.

“That’s a billion-dollar market for our products that is developing very quickly,” Lidow said. “We’ve got a few markets that didn’t exist before GaNs power devices. But we can also replace existing silicon chips.”

Lidow isn’t free to talk about customers in other markets. But based on what Valve and HTC have said about their Vive virtual reality system, it looks like it will use GaN-based LIDAR systems to sense the environment in a room and build a map of where a user with virtual reality goggles could move without tripping over the furniture. That LIDAR could be an interesting part of a sensing system that enables you to interact with games using your body or hand gestures. Right now, Microsoft uses an expensive arrangement of cameras to accomplish the same thing with its Kinect gesture control system in the Xbox consoles.

Augmented reality goggles (think Microsoft’s HoloLens, in my own opinion) could also use LIDAR.

“The real experience of 3D virtual reality is to interact with your environment, not have a screen wrap around your eyeballs,” Lidow said. “The awareness of your surroundings is an integral part of the experience. You want to interact with your environment. You can do extraordinary things like remote surgery. It relies on gallium nitride, because of its intrinsic speed compared to silicon.”

Lidow faces a lot of skepticism that he will have to overcome through execution.

Stephan Ohr, an analyst at Gartner, said that Lidow showed him a module using MOSFET power transistors that can be displaced by GaN transistors and increase the electronics density of the module by 60 percent. Ohr said in an email that he “absolutely” believes that GaN will find a place in high-frequency applications and displace silicon in certain applications. But will it render silicon obsolete?

“I’m not so sure about that,” Ohr said. “Alex is a wonderful proselytizer, to be sure, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Alex was not particularly enthused with analysts like me who believed that GaN use will grow primarily by displacing existing silicon transistors in existing applications. Rather, he is excited by brand new applications — automotive Lidar or wireless charging (using A4WP) — where silicon transistors had barely begun to proliferate with GaNs.”

Ohr estimates that GaNs chips are a $45 million market this year. But it could grow to more than $200 million by 2018, assuming a 2 percent replacement rate for silicon by that year.

“This will likely shoot up dramatically (the “hockey stick” we look for) in 2019 and 2020, as penetration rates increase in power supplies and the newer applications,” Ohr said.

Silicon chip makers may say they aren’t threatened. But there are a dozen or so GaN startups moving into the market, with funding from some very big companies like Intel, Samsung, and Panasonic. Texas Instruments has a GaN solution that uses EPC’s chips. Panasonic also re-introduced the Technics brand based on EPC’s chips, based on a brochure that Panasonic showed off in January.

“We’re the cornerstone of that introduction,” Lidow said.

Above: Panasonic’s Technics sound systems will use GaNs chips.

Image Credit: EPC

Back in January, mobile communications firm Infineon Technologies purchased International Rectifier, the original power chip company that Lidow’s father, Eric Lidow, founded. Alex Lidow believes that GaNs are most likely to disrupt the business of Infineon. At International Rectifier, in the 1970s, Lidow introduced power MOSFETs, which contributed to a net 15 percent reduction in global energy costs. International Rectifier introduced its power MOSFETs in 1979. By 1983, it had 43 competitors. Today, power MOSFETs are a $16 billion market, and Lidow wants to disrupt it.

Lidow will have to stay ahead of some powerful companies. Intel, the king of silicon and the world’s largest chip maker, is paying attention. It isn’t yet making gallium nitride chips, and it declined to comment on EPC or the displacement of silicon.

But in a research paper published in June at the VLSI Symposium, Intel researchers said, “These results make GaN MOS-HEMTs attractive for realizing energy-efficient, compact voltage regulators and radio frequency power amplifiers for mobile system-on-chips(SoCs) . This work shows, for the first time, that the application space of GaN electronics can be expanded beyond the existing high-voltage power and RF electronics (e.g. automobile, power conversion, basestation, radar) to include low-power mobile SoCs.”

But he can take heart in electronics history. The chip industry has been disrupted before. IBM’s Bernie Myerson introduced silicon germanium to replace silicon in high-performance communications chips. Silicon germanium, a hybrid of silicon and germanium, is now fairly ubiquitous because it brought about a 20 percent improvement in power efficiency. GaN’s practical improvement is 10 times, and its theoretical improvement is 1,000 times, Lidow said.

Lidow is using a similar strategy to what Myerson used. EPC creates sealed gallium nitride wafers in its own facility, using a metal organic chemical vapor deposition chamber. These are the same machines used to make blue light-emitting diodes, and there are several manufacturers of these machines. Then EPC passes its treated wafers to the manufacturing line of Episil, a contract chip manufacturer in Taiwan, which completes the processing in a standard silicon chip production factory. That keeps the cost of switching to GaNs low, Lidow said.

One way to get ahead of rivals is to get as many designs into the market as possible, and to write textbooks for chip designers on how to use GaNs. EPC is pursuing both paths.

“We want to make sure the textbooks are based on our specifications and our performance,” Lidow said.

Heteroepitaxy and Homoepitaxy have Equal Rights!

2012-05-08T20:19:00.001-07:00

No more needs to be said.

Soraa is hot!

2012-05-05T04:34:00.001-07:00

It seems that the United States is waking up to the gallium nitride opportunity, albeit 2-decades after Japan did. Soraa is really hot - check them out at www.soraa.com. They have LEDs made on bulk GaN that are just as bright as the world's best which are made on sapphire, but Soraa's are 10x smaller! Now that's what I'm talking about!

2011-12-11T18:13:00.001-08:00

I can't help myself - see http://www.grist.org/article/Newt-Gingrich-is-an-idiot.

Earth's Temperature Tracker

2011-11-28T12:51:00.001-08:00

NASA has published a really great and condense explanation of global cooling and global warming trends through the years and looking forward. Check it out at http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/features/200711_temptracker/. It is only 2 (web) pages and does a great job of summarizing major trend issues, including CO2, volcanoes, and greenhouse gases.

GaN diode performance continues to advance past SiC theoretical limits

2011-11-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

Because crystalline SiC materials development got real with early ONR and DARPA funding, SiC power electronics development has led to some great performances and the beginnings of commercialization, with SiC device results slowly getting closer to the theoretical limits of the SiC materials system.

However, we have known for decades that GaN should do better than SiC, and now that others, with Japan leading, are investing heavily in crystalline GaN materials technology, GaN devices are being demonstrated that surpass the theoretical limits of SiC devices. This article about R&D at Hosei Universiy and Hitachi Cable is yet another example of how crystalline GaN substrates enable us to cross that theoretical SiC performance limit.

With all else being equal, we would then predict that GaN is going to continue to get better and better and the day may be soon in which all GaN devices perform better than all SiC devices. But what about the price and the influence of other market dynamics? Well, the importance of GaN for solid state lighting and laser diodes means that GaN will continue to become more and more available in larger and larger form factor and a lower prices going forward, another reason to be "Long on GaN."

Cissoid: The Leader in High Temperature Semiconductor Solutions

2011-11-12T05:55:00.000-08:00

Cissoid is a company that appreciates the benefits of wide bandgap semiconductors for high performance applications in general, including those that must continue to perform at high temperatures. They are taking advantage of the fact that GaN has superb, and SiC almost as superb, a Baliga Figure of Merit, much better than Silicon itself.

2011-06-08T20:09:00.001-07:00

Global Warming Killing Rice Production

2010-08-10T04:33:00.000-07:00

This makes me very sad. Politicians argue while very bad things happen.

A Blog To Remember

2010-08-08T08:43:00.000-07:00

Mother Jones has Blogs that are read-worthy.

Can a Disruptive PV Technology Topple First Solar?

2010-08-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

There is a nice article at http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Can-a-Disruptive-Solar-Technology-Topple-First-Solar/ discussing the many competing technologies for harvesting energy from the sun.

A lot of bets have been placed. Some of those require gallium nitride (GaN), most don't. A very new report of new research results makes GaN look even more interesting for solar cell applications - see http://www.getsolar.com/News/California/Solar-Panels/Breakthrough-Solar-Technology-Could-Double-Cell-Efficiency-19918012 where we find the article:

"Breakthrough Solar Technology Could Double Cell Efficiency" and see that the materials play is based on cesium-coated GaN.

Very cool!!!

Global Warming

2010-08-08T07:32:00.000-07:00

Remember what Al Gore said in his book "An Inconvenient Truth?" He pointed out that most scientists agree, or was it all of them, yet the politicians seem relatively evenly divided on the issue of whether global warming was indeed occurring?

I figured the heck with human interpretation: lets just see what is happening to the Polar Ice Cap. You can get the latest Wikipedia thoughts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_ice_cap and then you get introduced to an interesting term "Arctic Shrinkage" and you can read more about the latter at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_shrinkage.

But again, the heck with interpretation, lets just look at the pictures. Go to http://www.google.com/images?q=Arctic%20shrinkage&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi&biw=1680&bih=933 and see for yourself.

Sincerely yours,

Captain Nitride

Got Medieval

2010-08-08T07:19:00.000-07:00

Got Medieval

Good Changes Ahead

2008-01-29T19:44:00.000-08:00

I just wanted to share the fact that I am so happy about the upcoming US presidential election! Let me explain:

My several scientist friends have independently provided me with odds over who is electable and when I compare each of their opinions I find that together they agree that the following three candidates are by far the only reasonably electable candidates for the next US president:

Barack Obama
Hillary Clinton
John McCain

Heck, this is wonderful since each one of these candidates is estimated by those same scientists to be approximately 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) times more likely to take good decisions for the US citizens and indeed for the entire planet!

And good decisions ahead bodes well for increased deployment of gallium nitride solutions since they will help us a lot in driving improved electrical efficiency for a broad range of commercial applications, including automotive and renewable energy electricity management systems.

The Bush Years of Evil (BYE) are coming to an end and better times are around the corner!

Will GaN Beat SiC For Hybrid Electric Vehicles?

2008-01-16T04:59:00.000-08:00

Hello everyone! I am excited to find out that the US Department of Energy has established something called the FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership which you can read about at http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/about/partnerships/freedomcar/.

If you tunnel in a bit you find out that there are strong thoughts that wide bandgap semiconductors will find their way into future automobiles because of their ability to enable higher electrical efficiency while simultaneously operating at higher temperatures which then enables reduced cooling needs. For example, see pages 19 & 20 of http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/pdfs/program/eett_roadmap.pdf.

You see, today's hybrid electric vehicles like the Toyota Prius require an extra water cooling line to cool off that hot set of silicon electronics for the inverter and other parts of the electronics helping the hybrid do its thing. Silicon gets very hot because it wastes so much electricity. This is very cool for gallium nitride and silicon carbide since both offer major benefits, not only in electrical efficiency, but also because they can handle higher current densities so you can make them smaller, and because they can be run much hotter (due to higher bandgaps) which means less cooling needs.

Will GaN beat SiC or will SiC win? Or will both GaN and SiC have a place in future automobile power electronics? Well, I am placing my bets on GaN. But however it comes out, its sure gonna be a fun ride!

Yours truly,

Captain Nitride

Welcome

2007-07-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

Dear Friend,

Welcome to the blog for III-Nitride Semiconductors, or III-N Semiconductors. III-N Semiconductors represent a new set of crystalline materials that have the potential to penetrate our lives in many ways.

III-N Semiconductors are all around in the form of ultra-violet (UV), blue, green, and white light emitting diodes (LEDs) and also violet/blue laser diodes. The commercialization of violet/blue lasers has enabled much higher optical storage densities to be reached such as found in the recently released Sony Playstation 3.

There are many other possible uses of III-N Semiconductors, including power electronics, wireless communications, optical fiber communications, water purification, and scientific instrumentation. Right now the total III-N Semiconductor device market is about Five Billion US Dollars ($5B). Over the next couple of decades, the market for III-N Semiconductor devices will grow to over $25B and will encompass many new applications.

I encourage you to put your thoughts forth on this exciting new area of technology and let our readers know how you feel about the many exciting applications ahead and how we can all move forward to make sure we get the most out of III-N Semiconductors.

Sincerely yours,

Captain Nitride