A material used to make power-saving light bulbs is gaining momentum in the world of semiconductors. KKR & Co. is the latest to place a bet.
How This Tech in Self-Driving Cars Is Paving a Road Beyond Silicon
Ever heard of gallium nitride transistors? You’re about to thanks to Lidar in cars.
In the future, self-driving cars will require laser-based sensing tech, and these systems will need new types of high-speed transistors and chips that can beat out silicon.
That’s the assertion of Alex Lidow, a Stanford PhD physicist, entrepreneur, and CEO and founder of Efficient Power Conversion (commonly called EPC), a company based in El Segundo, Calif. that makes transistors and chips out of a material that operates more quickly and efficiently—and costs less than silicon.
Emerging server technologies: 6 hot trends to watch
Whether the servers running your company’s applications are on your developers’ desks, in your data center, or in your private cloud, the technologies inside the racks are what enable—or throttle—application speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. The right new components and configurations, either added as upgrades, or “forklifted” in a hardware refresh, can be key to new activities such as analytics, big data, and machine learning.
‘Tis the season to be wasteful
As the world gears up for the upcoming holiday shopping season, the technology needed by online retailers to meet demands will bring with it many unintended negative byproducts: increased inefficiency, waste and pollution, to name a few. Online sales are expected to grow by 12 percent in the holiday season, on top of an already unprecedented, some might say alarming demand for online information.
Why alarming? In 2014, data centers in the United States consumed approximately 100 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy. According to Sudeep Pasricha, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Colorado State University, “that’s almost twice the electricity needed to power the whole state of Colorado for a year.” Further,this growing and insatiable desire for digital content is actually polluting the environment: the massive data centers that house all this digital content on servers are now responsible for an astounding 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a similar share to today’s aviation industry.
New Chips Providing A Spark For Wireless Charging
Aiming to jump-start the stalled market for wireless power systems, chip maker Efficient Power Conversion this week announced the launch of a new line of semiconductors made from gallium nitride, a material that’s 10 times faster than silicon and that many believe represents the future of the semiconductor industry. The new chips are designed specifically to support wireless power systems such as those produced by WiTricity.
EPC is headed by chip industry veteran Alex Lidow, who coinvented a type of transistor used for power conversion systems in a range of products including home appliances, air conditioners, and energy-efficient lighting. For many years the CEO of International Rectifier, still the largest producer of such transistors, Lidow has in recent years become one of the leading apostles of using gallium nitride, rather than silicon, to make transistors. EPC’s products are already in use in telecom equipment, satellites, laptop chargers, and virtual-reality devices. Now, says Lidow, his company’s technology is set to overhaul wireless power transfer.
