– Value Walk, October 20, 2016 – With Autonomous Cars, Small Detections Are A Huge Deal: Why Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) ’s Autopilot is Fundamentally Flawed by Dr. Alex Lidow
Alex Lidow Tag Archive
Why Tesla Motors Inc.’ Autopilot is Fundamentally Flawed
The Man On A Mission To Turn Silicon Valley Into Gallium Valley
In 1977, when he was 22 years old, inventor Alex Lidow had the sort of eureka moment most techies would kill for. While in graduate school at Stanford, Lidow co-invented, along with Thomas Herman, a type of device called the HEXFET power MOSFET that would make his family’s old company, International Rectifier, more than $930 million in royalties. And it turned Lidow’s grandfather, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, and his father, who fled Berlin in 1937, into important players in the hardware industry.
Now, with the winds of history at his back, Lidow is embarking on a new mission: He’s trying to do nothing less than upend the tech industry’s reliance on silicon.
A Silicon Pioneer Plays Taps for Silicon, And Power Cords
– Barron’s (blog) June 29, 2016 – Tuesday I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with Alex Lidow, founder of chip company, EPC of El Segundo, California, and something of an luminary of the chip world.
Blows Against the Empire: Lidow’s Radical GaN Logic
Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) CEO Alex Lidow tells Light Reading he might be within two years of a breakthrough that would upend the entire semiconductor market: CMOS logic implemented in gallium nitride (GaN).
Lidow has been talking about the end of the silicon era for years. The claim has often been taken as hyperbole because, while GaN has much to recommend it, there was always a catch: the fact that nothing can compete with CMOS logic, and GaN simply can’t do CMOS.
On the plus side, GaN has properties that make the performance of GaN power ICs (field-effect transistors, amplifiers, drivers, controllers, etc.) undeniably superior to their silicon counterparts in many circumstances. And silicon simply craps out in several situations, like, for example in high-frequency applications. You have to use GaN, or some other material.
How This Entrepreneur Rose From the Ashes to Challenge Silicon Valley
After getting his PhD in applied physics at Stanford, Alex Lidow spent 30 years at International Rectifier (IR), a publicly traded chip company founded by his father Eric Lidow back in the 1940s.
Alex pioneered IR’s power management technology, co-authored the core-patents on which its business was built, became co-CEO with his brother, Derek, in 1995, and ran the company solo after Derek left to found market research firm iSupply in 1999.
