Will gallium nitride electronics change the world? | Upscaled

Will gallium nitride electronics change the world? | Upscaled

Silicon may be at the heart of most gadgets, but it’s not the only semiconductor around. Gallium nitride has been getting a lot of attention recently for it’s electrical properties, which outperform silicon in a lot of areas. Gallium nitride has the potential to revolution power systems, including solar, electric vehicles, and even phone chargers. Beyond that, it’s finding uses in the mobile industry, and could even be used to build ultra fast processors.

But how feasible is any of that, and even if it’s possible, how long will it take?

Fuseschool’s conductivity animations

Ingineerix’s Tesla Model 3 inverter video

Check out the full list of sources here
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTb3kB11070dOSYH_fLM5kgeg7BBWf867oW9ZB2etZgzxkVyu-Zyvadi8Ji8hXujaY9gJ0Fn07dFXyF/pub

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50 Comments

  1. Highland Tyrant Attack on August 20, 2020 at 9:01 pm

    GaN wafers are also significantly thicker than Si ones and are much more fragile. I’m not even sure theyre doing 200mm GaN or able to and 300mm is the standard now for any new fab?

  2. Anik Samiur Rahman on August 20, 2020 at 9:01 pm

    6:27 This schematic reminds me of ElectroBOOM. Raise your hand if "FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER" came to your mind as well.

  3. Jiri Mysicka on August 20, 2020 at 9:02 pm

    Very well explained, thank you

  4. Will T on August 20, 2020 at 9:02 pm

    Great video

  5. UnderTheRain on August 20, 2020 at 9:03 pm

    blu-ray the most important …… no not even close

  6. FarSeeker8 on August 20, 2020 at 9:08 pm

    How about talking about the development of silicon technology from 1906 to the invention of the Silicon transistor?

  7. chander kant on August 20, 2020 at 9:08 pm

    MY INTEL CPU BURN AT 98 DEGREE
    THIS WILL DESTROY OVERCLOCKING NOOBS

  8. grace cho on August 20, 2020 at 9:09 pm

    Awesome video! Could you cover one on 5G- specifically geared towards wireless infrastructure and the usage of GaN for these types of applications.

  9. Otto Dachat on August 20, 2020 at 9:11 pm

    I Galium Nitride can reduce heat, then I’ll gladly toss out my old X58 SuperMicro Motherboard, it does get hot! and I’m so sick of heatsinks

  10. Purnima Maity on August 20, 2020 at 9:13 pm

    AMAZING.wish i had you as my professor.

  11. Alan Meigs on August 20, 2020 at 9:13 pm

    Wow, haven’t been back to Engadget in over 5 years, this was an incredible video!

  12. Jared Hansen on August 20, 2020 at 9:14 pm

    @Engadget People keep misrepresenting Moore’s law, because no one seems to have ever actually read it. It says the number of transistors will double every 2 years, not that the chips will maintain the same density, or performance itself will double. The number of transistors means the raw number of transistors – in the entire package. Cache memory and anything else that improves performance is just another component of the chip to try to maximize performance within a given architecture. If you actually look the chip packages as a whole, however many cores it has and however it makes use of them, the actual number of transistors has continued to double.
    There actually is no horizon in sight regarding Moore’s law. Even if the chip industry gets stuck at 5 nm, forever, that has nothing to do with Moore’s law. If the package keeps growing and those transistors, doing whatever job within the package, just keeps increasing, the chip will just get bigger and maybe cooling or optical circuit integration will become the most significant roadblock to performance increases. But rest assured, as long as there’s competition in the market and people ask for more performance, the chip package will find a way to deliver it. If feature size ever hits (or just grazes) a size limit, giving up on having to continually chase smaller feature size lithography may even make it easier to keep Moore’s law going strong!

  13. jamie Webb on August 20, 2020 at 9:15 pm

    I used to use gallium nitrate to breakdown aluminium padlocks then steal there bike, lol stupid meat eaters didn’t know what hit ’em.

  14. Ravi Chanana on August 20, 2020 at 9:16 pm

    What about Germanium Carbide for power electronics?

  15. Crystal Yeow Ching Ching on August 20, 2020 at 9:19 pm

    I want to leave Singapore

  16. Asanka W on August 20, 2020 at 9:20 pm

    Great video!

  17. Jamie Bonnett on August 20, 2020 at 9:20 pm

    At @13:05 you say that the white LED was invented in 1993, this is false, the "white" LED was actually a blue LED. It is only in the last decade the white LED was invented.

  18. Melissastormchaser8472 on August 20, 2020 at 9:20 pm

    i cant wait o see a gan processor

  19. Navitas Semiconductor on August 20, 2020 at 9:22 pm

    For an update in how new, fast gallium nitride (GaN) is taking over from old, slow silicon chips in fast chargers for phones, tablets and laptops, see Navitas Semiconductor or go to GaNFast dot com. Xiaomi, OPPO, Lenovo and Samsung all have GaN chargers in mass production.

  20. Rod Fer on August 20, 2020 at 9:22 pm

    Excellent

  21. Gimmel Yod on August 20, 2020 at 9:22 pm

    I noticed that some of the graphs seemed to spec silicon carbide with similar specs to GaN. What is the prospect of using SiC for some of these hardware apps?

  22. Beboba on August 20, 2020 at 9:23 pm

    what about price ? silicon is cheap as dirt

  23. ThankYouESM on August 20, 2020 at 9:26 pm

    I saw a mention a few years ago about quasi-crystals and lasers being called the speed of light processing given an explanation as to why it doesn’t need any logic gates on account of how the crossing of LED lights will change colors to do all the calculations which were said to be very easy to manufacture.

  24. The Travelling Friend on August 20, 2020 at 9:27 pm

    Great video!

  25. Bodragon on August 20, 2020 at 9:27 pm

    This guy hasn’t got a clue, a fucking clue what he’s talking about.
    Why don’t you get a proper engineer here, who knows what they are talking about?
    FAIL!!!
    FAIL!!!
    >>>>

  26. John Smith on August 20, 2020 at 9:27 pm

    The first patent for a Xsistor was in 1926 and it functioned like a FET, but used Vanadium Pentoxide as the semiconductor

  27. Arden Nielsen on August 20, 2020 at 9:28 pm

    how would growing the gallium nitride be affected under a zero g environment?

  28. Prashant Piprotar on August 20, 2020 at 9:28 pm

    Oppo’s 125W and 65W fast chargers are using it. Just announced few days after this video. NOICE!!!

  29. LINCS on August 20, 2020 at 9:31 pm

    very cool .. exciting 20 years ahead

  30. Cesar Trujillo on August 20, 2020 at 9:33 pm

    More electric vehicles please. Talk about push vs pull marketing and the quandary legacy car manufacturers are in.

  31. Paresh Pandit on August 20, 2020 at 9:33 pm

    Awesome job — looking forward to more such informative pieces! 🙂

  32. Crash Builds on August 20, 2020 at 9:33 pm

    I’ve seen Gallium Nitride in use in a lot of satellite systems, but isn’t the cost extremely prohibitive also? Space-grade MCUs are usually about 100 times more expensive due to shielding and unusual manufacturing techniques, doesn’t bode well for economy of scale if you throw in new materials :/

  33. Eric Swanson on August 20, 2020 at 9:35 pm

    3:51 those are diodes.

  34. Niko on August 20, 2020 at 9:37 pm

    Or…. it mght be just another graphene.

  35. reppich1 on August 20, 2020 at 9:41 pm

    GaN Power stage transistors are a huge improvement for Audio and RF signals is a huge jump by reducing complexity yet getting Tube scale performance.

  36. AsakuraClan on August 20, 2020 at 9:43 pm

    This was super informative, thank you! Can you make a follow-up video about where Gallium is mined/produced? And it’s impact on the environment?

  37. DefunctNinja on August 20, 2020 at 9:44 pm

    What about spintronics? That seems more efficient than conventional electronics

  38. TettteT on August 20, 2020 at 9:44 pm

    Mmm… good research about gallium nitride. I learned a lot. Some cringey statements about computers, though.

  39. Rob Oo on August 20, 2020 at 9:46 pm

    Chris is HOT! Engaging! Charismatic! Keep up the good work.

  40. Somnath Banerjee on August 20, 2020 at 9:48 pm

    Pls make a video on optical fibre cable & zblan.

  41. James Stevens on August 20, 2020 at 9:49 pm

    Good article!
    You’re average server farm spends more money on cooling than it does on the actual processing and networking. Plus there’s big drama if cooling breaks down. High operating, or ambient temp servers and networking devices have become something of a holy grail for years now. If GAN based server and networking hardware can be made at large scales for relatively low cost, the energy savings will be significant. There’s also a push for quiet, mostly fanless commercial server & networking gear that can be hidden inside regular cabinets where people are working in small businesses.

  42. Nathan Mills on August 20, 2020 at 9:51 pm

    but can it run crysis?

  43. crowdoftheavatar on August 20, 2020 at 9:51 pm

    I don’t want 300 degree anything, anywhere near me. I don’t even want 80 degrees near me.

  44. Xbob42 on August 20, 2020 at 9:53 pm

    For anyone wondering why a blue LED would be a very important invention, I looked it up as I guess they didn’t feel like going into it on this video: Basically, it was the one LED color they still needed to make a white LED. Because of the massively increased efficiency of LED lights (50% of a white LED’s used electricity creates light, while only 4% of an incandescent bulb’s used electricity creates light) it means they’re very easy to keep running in places with low amounts of power, and can easily be used for long periods of time on batteries. So it helped to massively decrease energy usage for everyone who uses lights in general, to providing good, quality, easily maintained and long-lasting light to places that desperately needed it.
    And that’s just for light bulbs.
    The Blu-Ray itself, as I think might have been said in the video, on the other hand, is most definitely NOT one of the most important tech innovations ever. Unless there’s some key fact about Blu-Ray that I’m missing, in which case I’m happy to hear a correction!

  45. panda panda on August 20, 2020 at 9:54 pm

    The switching speed number of silicon is not shown

  46. Neojhun on August 20, 2020 at 9:55 pm

    I feel this series is continued to be referenced years later. Please preserve on more platforms.

  47. WaschyNumber1 on August 20, 2020 at 9:57 pm

    Very informativ 🖖
    How is the environment impact in comparison? 🤔

  48. Born FE on August 20, 2020 at 9:58 pm

    the video was interesting until you mentioned NASA

  49. Gary Harris on August 20, 2020 at 9:59 pm

    I remember a time when science shows were manly, mature and measured. Now we have science reporters who probably suffer from arrested development and adhd they are boyish, geeky and over the top. God help the next generation when these geeks pass the torch.

  50. kibret Messalea on August 20, 2020 at 10:00 pm

    Well organised and it’s clear he has done lots of research!

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