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.
Silicon — the core ingredient in semiconductors and the driving force behind the electronics industry — is reaching its limit, says Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion Corporation. His Los Angeles-based company is investigating the capacity of gallium nitride (GaN) to disrupt the $400 billion (£277bn) silicon industry with its improved powers of semiconducting. “This is the first time that there is a semiconductor that is both lower cost and has a higher performance than silicon,” Lidow says.
The year is 1965. The Beatles release four albums. The war rages on in Vietnam. And a research-and-development professional by the name of Gordon Moore makes a bold prediction that will have irrevocable implications on technological development, impacting many sectors of the global economy for decades to come.
Over the last 50 years, Moore’s observation — that the number of transistors on silicon chips and therefore their processing power was doubling approximately every 24 months — has evolved from observation to market demand to Moore’s law.
As we reflect on Moore’s law at its 50th anniversary, we cannot overlook its significance. It is at the heart of the entire technology industry and beyond, driving productivity, the economy and, indeed, human society.
Last week, El Segundo, Calif.-based Efficient Power Conversion, announced that it’s offering two types of power transistors made from gallium nitride that it has priced cheaper than their silicon counterparts.
“This is the first time that something has really been higher performance and lower cost than silicon,” CEO Alex Lidow says. “Gallium nitride has taken the torch and is now running with it.”
Gallium nitride and silicon carbide have long been attractive alternatives to silicon in power electronics: they’re capable of faster switching speeds and can handle a higher voltage than a same-sized silicon device. But silicon has long been less expensive to manufacture.
Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) has two cheaper offerings: a 60-volt and a 100-V power transistor. The company says such devices should be ideally suited for a range of applications, including wireless power transfer, laser ranging systems for cars, and RF transmitters.
Silicon falls into what the chip industry calls group IV of the periodic table of the elements. One way to keep pushing progress will involve elements drawn from columns to either side of the group IV column — thus the term III-V materials, pronounced simply “three-five.”
With III-V chip manufacturing, all that stays the same — but silicon will get new elements layered on top. That will help electrons flow faster, which means less voltage needed to get them moving. If the chips need less power, then transistors can be smaller and switch faster.
One company betting its future on III-V materials is Efficient Power Conversion, a 34-person startup led by Chief Executive Alex Lidow. EPC already is seeing steady revenue growth from devices that incorporate a III-V layer made of gallium nitride (GaN). In 2016 or 2017 he expects to adapt the gallium nitride manufacturing process to work for the logic circuits that do the thinking in computer processors. Because of gallium nitride’s electrical properties, “you immediately get a thousand times potential in improvement” over conventional silicon, he said.
