INDUSTRY POWER ELECTRONICS
as much customer feedback as possible, we selected DigiKey as our global distribution partner. This allowed us to deliver product to designers overnight, at a reasonable cost. Several awards, including Electronic Products’ “Product of the Year” started to come in as acknowledgement of the advancement of the field by our GaN transistors.
Penetrating the market At this stage, I drew on the lessons that I had learnt from the early days of the power MOSFET, and applied them to our eGaN FETs. I knew that the answers to four key questions controlled the adoption rate of a product based on a new technology: Does it enable new applications? Is it easy to use? Is it reliable? And is it cost effective?
To give our company the best possible chance of success, we organized ourselves to best address all four questions. We hired applications engineers and field applications engineers at the top of their professions, and we devoted as much time to reliability testing as product development. We also wrote papers and even a book, GaN Transistors for Efficient Power Conversion, to help engineers climb the learning curve and exploit the true potential of our devices. And we convinced National Semiconductor, now Texas Instruments, to develop driver ICs that would allow users to squeeze the maximum performance from our devices. New applications such as Wireless Power Transmission, Light Detection and Ranging, and Envelope Tracking fueled the early-adopter cycle.
It is now three years since we launched our first product, but from our perspective, it is clear that our work has only just begun. Although we have achieved our goal of making an extraordinary enhancement mode transistor, and we have expanded our offerings to transistors ranging from 40 V up to 200 V, we are still trying to make the lives of our designers easier. It is paramount to select the right board layout when using our eGaN FETs, because this enables the greatest improvements in switching performance, it limits device overshoot, and it takes advantage of low parasitic packaging. Our efforts in this direction have revealed that the optimal eGaN FET PCB layout design offers a five-fold increase in switching speed, plus a 40 percent reduction in voltage overshoot, compared to the 40 V silicon MOSFET benchmark.
We continue to trim the cost of making our devices, and we believe that in three-to-four
years’ time, our eGaN FETs will be cheaper to make than their MOSFET counterparts. Our biggest challenge is to economically grow the epitaxial heterostructure on a silicon wafer, and we are being supported in this endeavor by the equipment industry.
An additional target for us is to expand our product range by developing higher voltage (600 V and above) enhancement mode FETs, as well as monolithic integrated circuits that include both driver circuits and power transistors. These developments will allow our GaN devices to effectively compete across 90 percent of the MOSFET, IGBT, and power IC markets.
Our overarching goal is to build a great new semiconductor company that enables efficient power conversion using GaN-on-silicon technology. We have been fortunate to attract outstanding professionals, as well as new graduates, willing to join a small startup that has embarked on a very big mission.
© 2013 Angel Business Communications. Permission required.
Figure 2: Comparison between EPC’s first- generation eGaN FET and silicon power MOSFETs
The early
EPC team receiving Electronic Products’ “Product of the Year” award
Further reading: A. Lidow et al. 2012, GaN Transistors for Efficient Power Conversion, 1st Ed. Power Conversion Publications, El Segundo. M. de Rooij et al. eGaN FET – Silicon Shoot-out 9: Wireless Power Converters Power Electronics Technology 38 (2012) J. Strydom The eGaN FET-Silicon Power Shoot-Out Vol. 8: Envelope Tracking Power Electronics Technology 38 (2012) D. Reusch, The eGaN FET-Silicon Power Shoot-Out Vol. 13: Optimal PCB Layout Power Electronics Technology 39 (2013)
June 2013
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