Happy Nice Mall

Silicon carbide is the senior citizen of WBGs, which has been in development as a transistor material for decades. At that time, engineers began using younger-onset WBG materials such as gallium nitride or GaN. In the 1980s, researchers used gallium nitride to create the world’s first bright blue LEDs. Blue light consists of high-energy photons; With its wide bandgap, gallium nitride was the first semiconductor that could practically produce photons with sufficient energy. Three scientists awarded in 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics for this innovationwhich has become ubiquitous in devices such as TV screens and light bulbs.

Recently, researchers have started using gallium nitride to improve power electronics. The material has come to commercial fruition in adapters used to charge phones and computers over the past few years. These adapters are smaller, lighter, faster charging and more efficient than conventional adapters using silicon transistors.

“A typical charger you buy for your computer is 90 percent efficient,” said Jim Witham, CEO of GaN Systems, a Canadian company that supplies the transistors in Apple’s gallium nitride laptop chargers. published last fall. “Gallium nitride is 98 percent efficient. You can cut power losses by a factor of four.”

Yole Développement predicts that the gallium nitride market will grow from a total of $200 million this year to $2 billion in 2027.

Wide-bandgap materials are also finding their way into other applications. Data centers, large facilities filled with computer servers running the online services we all depend on, are notorious electricity users. Compuware, a premium supplier of power supplies to data centers, says gallium nitride-based power supplies reduce wasted electricity by around 25 percent, take up 20 percent less space than traditional devices, and allow customers to run more servers in the same location. shelves. The company also says that gallium nitride power supplies are used in data centers operated by large corporations around the world.

Engineers are also working on using WBG materials to make better use of renewable energy sources. Solar cells and wind turbines rely on traction inverters to feed electricity to a home or grid, and many companies expect gallium nitride to do the job better than silicon. Enphase, a supplier of inverters for solar-powered installations, is currently testing gallium nitride-based inverters to ensure they can withstand decades of harsh rooftop weather. In one test, Enphase inverters immersed in a pressure cooker underwater, placed the pressure cooker in a sealed chamber and oscillated between 185 degrees Fahrenheit and minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit for 21 days. If gallium nitride devices survive the challenges, Enphase co-founder Raghu Belur plans to make a rapid transition to the new material. “It’s definitely going in that direction,” he said.

At an investor meeting last year, a senior Enphase engineer gave a more precise estimate, saying, “It’s the end of the road for silicon.”