GaN we replace Silicon?

Is this the death of Silicon? What is Gallium Nitride (GaN)? What is it actually good for? What does the future of transistors look like?

There is something exciting out there that may change our devices all the way from laptops to electric cars.

Most electronics these days are based on silicon but we’re starting to see some circuits that incorporate gallium nitride, a material that some scientists are saying will lead us to a whole new world of post-silicon computing.

Pure gallium itself is a silvery metal probably most “famous” for melting at about 29.76 °C in palms of people’s hands. Sadly, its not that useful in this form. Gallium, however, makes a lot of interesting compounds with different elements. One of many is Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), that has been used for decades as a semiconductor. Cray Inc., a subsidiary of the HP enterprise, actually tried to build a supercomputer with GaAs processors in the late ‘80s.

For simplicity, lets call Semiconductors lazy by default. Electrons in them won’t move but on energy supply it will turn to a conductor and electricity flows (the energy supplied moves electrons from a valence band up into a conduction band where they can move). Around this property of semiconductors, was the basis for transistors. They act as valves for electricity supply. These transistors are further arranged into logic gates and logic gates into ICs and now you have enough circuitry to have your very own pocket calculator!

GaN is a little late to this “Silicon Replacement” project.

GaN, is gallium bonded to nitrogen gas and in its natural state it forms a hard yellowish crystal. But before we get to what it might be used in the future, GaN has actually already changed the world in 1993 when Shuji Nakamura building on work done by Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano used gallium nitride to build the world’s first blue light LED. This alone led to the blue ray, arguably technology’s most important innovation ever. Blue LEDs when mixed with a little bit of Indium and a yellowish phosphor formed white LED. Building on to this discovery, today almost all the LEDs used for indoor lighting and flat panel displays are based on GaN.

These days GaN has been getting a lot of hype for how it might improve power delivery, wireless communication and maybe even processing.

All of these factors makes this compound extremely well suited to power electronics.

Experts working on this have bigger dreams than just advanced chargers that use GaN. Better solar cells, more efficient power transmission, etc. Basically, there’s a lot up for grabs. If electric cars only used GaN it would make it much more efficient than current cars, giving a longer range to drive.

The key is that GaN edges out Silicon when it comes to efficiency. We may lose about 1% of the energy that we try to convert, whereas if you take a Silicon device, we lose 3%. This may not sound like much, but when we consider just how much silicon we use in everything, it adds up. Currently, if we look at GaN electronics they appear to be slightly more expensive than their Silicon based counterparts but if you build the whole system using GaN they can actually be much cheaper than Silicon tagged with way better performances. From a sustainable angle, losing less energy means saving power.

We know from evidences, experiments that GaN works really well.

The issues that could explain this stagnation in GaN innovation is systemic. We need to understand that silicon is cheap, ubiquitous, we’re used to it and the entire industry is built on it. GaN has researches and scientists sold but its unable to do the same for the Silicon Valley.

The main obstacle for widespread adoption is people just need to get used to it. It’s an entirely different component. It’s not as simple as replacing Silicon with GaN. This replacement needs to be accompanied with completely different circuitry. We have to replace or optimize the electronics around these GaN components. People tend to be conservative. We know they work but the circuitry needs rebuilding to fully take advantage of what this amazing compound can offer.

With the technology we have it’s also quite difficult to synthesize GaN crystals. The growing process of this crystal can lead to a lot of defects which means we need even more to get enough of the useful stuff. Some are trying to grow GaN on top of silicon, so we can use platforms we already have. But even that takes some special apparatuses that aren’t available that readily.

So for now, the industry will have to juggle multiple kinds of semiconductors. GaN, in some applications will be better than silicon. In some other applications, silicon will be better.

There are other materials like Silicon Carbide and Gallium oxide and many as such that also have such benefits and drawbacks. So its a whole process we have to explore.

It’ll be a little while before Gallium nitride takes over the world, so its best to stay patient with it.

*the study was based on the United States’ electricity consumption data in 2019.

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