News Article
EPC eGaN Products Win “Product of the Year”
Electronic Products Magazine awarded the prize based on innovative design, significant advancement in technology or application and substantial achievement in price and performance.
Efficient Power Conversion Corporation’s (EPC) family of enhancement-mode gallium nitride on silicon (eGaN) power FETs have been honored with an Electronic Products’ Product of the Year award.
The editors of Electronic Products, a leading trade publication for electronic design engineers, evaluated thousands of products launched in 2010. The winning products were selected on the basis of innovative design, significant advancement in technology or application and substantial achievement in price and performance. The eGaN FETs demonstrated success in the category of discrete semiconductors.
“The enhanced-mode GaN FETs from EPC are a significant step in the realization of new products for designers,” said Paul O’Shea, Senior Editor for Electronic Products Magazine. “They have less on-resistance, better electron mobility, higher switching rate and smaller die size. And, they are priced competitively because the gallium nitride can be grown directly on a silicon wafer and processed in a standard CMOS foundry. New applications are enabled by eGaN due to its quantum leap in frequency and the market is already seeing it replace MOSFETs in high-performance applications.”
“We are very proud that the editors of Electronic Products have selected eGaN FET products for this prestigious award. This award substantiates that EPC’s enhancement-mode GaN power transistors represent a major breakthrough in power conversion technology. We believe that performance from silicon-based MOSFETs has reached the end of the road and that eGaN technology will lead the way for continued increases in performance in power management,” said Alex Lidow, EPC’s co-founder and CEO.
The 2010 Product of the Year Awards were announced in the January 2011 issue of Electronic Products with a cover feature and a brief description of each product. 2010 marks the 35th annual Electronic Products’ “Product of the Year” Awards, which recognizes the best products in the industry.
Spanning a range of 40 Volts to 200 Volts, and 4 milliohms to 100 milliohms, eGaN FETs demonstrate significant performance advantages over state-of-the-art silicon-based power MOSFETs. EPC’s technology produces devices that are smaller than similar resistance silicon devices and have many times superior switching performance.
Applications that benefit from this eGaN performance are DC-DC power supplies, point-of-load converters, class D audio amplifiers, notebook and netbook computers, solar microinverters, Power over Ethernet (PoE), LED drive circuits, telecom base stations, and cell phones, to name just a few.
Products based on eGaN technology are available today and are priced between $1.12 and $5.00 in 1k quantities.
EPC is a leader in enhancement mode Gallium Nitride based power management devices and was the first to introduce enhancement-mode Gallium-Nitride-on-Silicon (eGaNTM) FETs as power MOSFET replacements. These devices are used in applications such as servers, netbooks, notebooks, LED lighting, cell phones, base stations, microinverters, and class-D audio amplifiers with device performance many times greater than the best silicon power MOSFETs.
