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.

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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.

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