New Industry Products

AEC Q101 GaN FET Helps Time-of-Flight Lidar Systems ‘See’ Better

October 15, 2019 by Paul Shepard

Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) announced successful AEC Q101 qualification of the 15V EPC2216 designed for lidar applications where increased accuracy is vital such as in self-driving cars and other time-of-flight (TOF) applications including facial recognition, warehouse automation, drones and mapping.

The EPC2216, a 15V, 26mΩ, eGaN FET with a 28A pulsed current rating in a tiny 1.02mm2 footprint, is designed for use firing the lasers in lidar systems because the FET can be triggered to create high-current with extremely short pulse widths. The short pulse width leads to higher resolution, and the tiny size and low cost, make eGaN FETs suited for time-of-flight applications from automotive to industrial, healthcare to smart advertising, gaming and security.

To complete AEC Q101 testing, EPC’s eGaN FETs underwent rigorous environmental and bias-stress testing, including humidity testing with bias (H3TRB), high temperature reverse bias (HTRB), high temperature gate bias (HTGB), temperature cycling (TC), as well as several other tests.

The company noted that EPC’s WLCS packaging passed all the same testing standards created for conventional packaged parts, demonstrating that the superior performance of chip-scale packaging does not compromise ruggedness or reliability. These eGaN devices are produced in facilities certified to the Automotive Quality Management System Standard IATF 16949.

EPC’s CEO and co-founder Alex Lidow commented, “This new automotive product joins a rapidly expanding family of EPC transistors and integrated circuits designed to enable autonomous driving and improve resolution are reduce cost in all time-of-flight applications.”

Price and Availability

The EPC2216 eGaN FET is priced at 2.5Ku/reel at $0.532 each and is available for immediate delivery from Digi-Key.