MIT researchers fabricate reliable GaN power transistors at low cost

There are hardly any electronic devices, which doesn't require power conversion from one voltage to other voltage and most of the times, the conversion is from AC voltage source to DC voltage source in personal digital devices. For each of such billions of digital electronics devices, you compulsorily need voltage rectifying diodes, power switching transistors, and transformers. You need at least twice the number of diodes and twice the number of transistors to power each of the digital device we use. That's a huge market for power semiconductor devices. Most of the diodes and transistors today are made up of the popular silicon material. The power conversion efficiency is in the range of 80 to 95% depending on the architecture of power conversion and also the load requirements. With the Internet of things (IoT) market growing into not just billions, but tens of billions of digital devices. An increment of even 0.1% efficiency improvement in power conversion will result in big saving in power. The use of silicon -based power semiconductor devices can only push the efficiency up to 95% and also they have the limitations when it comes to size of the device and also the switching speeds. The power semiconductor industry successfully explored two important materials to achieve higher power efficiency, small size and also faster switching. The two materials are Silicon Ca...