Hi all,
a fascinating article in the FT today (see full article at bottom of post) on a Chinese company called Anker (see link below) that has developed and now sells the first GaN based (as opposed to SiC based) charger for phones. According to the FT article the charger is much smaller than normal chargers and according to Anker's website charges 2.5x faster than the standard charger. The article even lists Aixtron and quotes somebody saying that "once the technology is out of the box it will be adapted rapidly".
Regards,
Fel
Anker website: https://www.anker.com/deals/powerport_atom
FT Article:
A tiny phone, tablet and laptop charger, the first to use gallium nitride rather than silicon chips, has seen sales four times greater than predicted, prompting the Chinese company behind it to try to ramp up production.
Anker, a Shenzhen-based company that specialises in computer and mobile phone accessories, unveiled a line of chargers using gallium nitride (GaN), which conducts electrons 1,000 times faster than silicon, in January.
The use of GaN allowed Anker to virtually halve the size of its charger, while retaining full-speed charging. Another Chinese company, RAVPower, has also started using GaN in its chargers.
“Silicon limits have been pushed almost to the extreme,” said Steven Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Anker. “But GaN is at [the next] phase.”
The introduction of the new semiconductor into the consumer market came after a series of military and other commercial applications, in everything from electric vehicles to radar systems.
Raytheon, the US defence group, said in 2017 that it had spent $300m researching GaN since 1999. Like some of its peers, it uses the material in its active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, which are able to detect stealth fighters at long range.
“Once the power technology is out of the box it will be widely adopted around the world and that means everyone can produce power-switching modules,” said Stephen Bryen, a former deputy undersecretary of defence and senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. “And that is what is used in the radars — that’s the nexus between commercial and military use.”
Bankers familiar with the deals said military uses were at least partly behind Washington’s move to block two bids by Chinese buyers to acquire companies with the technology, Philips’ lighting business and Aixtron, in 2016.
GaN also featured in an official inquiry into the death of 31-year-old engineer Shane Todd, who was found dead in his flat two days after leaving a job at the Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore, where he had been working on the development of GaN.
Several IME employees told the inquiry that the US engineer had been involved in a “potential project” between the IME and Huawei for the development of a GaN amplifier.
While GaN has been around since the 1960s, initial uses were restricted to LEDs and Blu-ray discs. Beyond power, researchers are also looking at the use of GaN in logic gates, the brains of a computer, a development that could enable the continuation of Moore’s law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years.
“GaN logic is one exciting possibility but we either have to come up with something really rather clever to allow us to do logic in the way silicon does logic. Or we have to think about a complete redesign of circuits,” said Rachel Oliver, professor at the Cambridge Centre for GaN.
The material is also being deployed in radars in Taiwan, which has been functioning as an independent country since 1945 but lives under the threat of invasion by China, which regards the island as part of its territory.
“They think putting in high-end radars is going to give them capability to knock out these Chinese stealth fighters like the F-20,” said Mr Bryen. “And if Taiwan is doing it you can be pretty sure China is doing it as well. Huawei is deeply involved in GaN so you can assume they have the foundries.”
Other manufacturers exploring the technology include Japanese electric vehicle makers, said Martin Kuball, who is leading a project on GaN in power electronics at the University of Bristol. “GaN has the advantage because they are trying to be as compact as possible and waste as little electricity as possible.”
That is also the appeal for Anker, which is moving “a large part” of its consumer electronics portfolio to GaN and sees up to a dozen more products coming out this year using the technology.
Mr Yang said it had taken the company 18 months to bring the new chargers to market. While the sticker price was unchanged from the previous generation, he said the increased costs of GaN meant it would not be widely deployed in the near term. “At this moment there’s still a cost difference,” he said.
Danqing Wang, a doctoral candidate researching GaN at Harvard University, said: “Moore’s law states that as a device becomes smaller it also becomes cheaper. GaN can definitely make things smaller, but I’m not sure if things can be cheaper in the next few years.” |
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