10 January 2011

EPC’s eGaN FETs named Product of the Year

Efficient Power Conversion Corp (EPC) of El Segundo, CA, USA says that its family of enhancement-mode gallium nitride on silicon (eGaN) power FETs has been honored with a 2010 Product of the Year award in the January 2011 issue of Electronic Products (the magazine for electronic design engineers).

After editors evaluated thousands of products launched in 2010, the winners 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,” says senior editor Paul O’Shea. “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,” he adds. “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,” he adds.

“This award substantiates that EPC’s enhancement-mode GaN power transistors represent a major breakthrough in power conversion technology,” claims EPC’s co-founder & CEO Alex Lidow. “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.”

Spanning a range of 40–200V and 4–100 milli-Ohms, eGaN FETs demonstrate performance many times greater than the best silicon-based power MOSFETs. EPC says that its technology produces devices that are smaller than similar-resistance silicon devices and have many times better switching performance.

Applications that can benefit include 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.
Products based on eGaN technology are priced at $1.12–5.00 in quantities of 1000, and are available through Digi-Key Corp.

See related items:

EPC’s eGaN products win EDN China’s Innovation Award

Tags: EPC GaN GaN FETs

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