News

Kyma Technologies Selected by ARPA-E for GaN Substrate Development

November 03, 2013 by Jeff Shepard

Kyma Technologies, Inc. has been selected by the US Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) for $3.2M in funding to advance the technology for manufacturing crystalline gallium nitride (GaN) substrates. In a separate announcement, an ARPA-E award went to Avogy, Inc. for the development of vertical GaN transistors using the Kyma substrates. Kyma is one of 8 small businesses and 14 companies overall that were selected for awards under the SWITCHES program, which is short for "Strategies for Wide-Bandgap, Inexpensive Transistors for Controlling High-Efficiency Systems." All of the grants were awarded to firms that are finding innovative ways to lower the cost and improve the efficiency of power electronics.

Kyma’s SWITCHES project promises to realize high quality low cost GaN substrates via application of Kyma’s patented and proprietary high growth rate gallium nitride (GaN) crystal growth technology to ultra-high quality seeds.

Kyma Chief Science Officer Jacob Leach is the Principle Investigator on the project. Leach received his PhD in Engineering at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he studied the physics of high speed GaN transistor technology under the direction of Professor Hadis Morkoc.

Kyma’s President and CEO Keith Evans commented, “We thank ARPA-E for their vision and support of a growing portfolio of projects which are transformational in terms of their potential impact on the environment as well as our nation’s future competitiveness in critically important green technologies.”