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Transphorm Demonstrates GaN Progress at Techno Frontier

July 23, 2014 by Power Pulse1595211359

The news at Techno Frontier from Transphorm, Inc. is the continuation of the story begun late in 2013 when the acquisition of the Fujitsu GaN Business unit was announced. This year, Transphorm is announcing that it is now working with three distributors in Japan. They are UKC Electronics Corporation, IIDA Electronics (TSUSHO) Co., Ltd, and FEI (Fujitsu Electronics Incorporated).

Manning the Transphorm booth are both Transphorm sales and FAEs formally from Fujitsu Semiconductor and representatives of each of the distributors who are engaging with customers and providing samples of Trahsphorm’s 600-V qualified and reliable GaN power devices. This is a significant milestone that demonstrates the maturity of the 600-V products designed by Transphorm which are now successfully being transferred from the fabrication facility in Santa Barbara to the significantly larger scale mass production Aizu fabrication facility (providing exclusive foundry for Transphorm for GaN power devices) in Japan.

“The confidence in these products is further justified by the successful initial yields and early reliability performance demonstrated with the initial products produced from the new fab. Volume production from the Aizu foundry is expected to begin this fall, a very fast timeline for process integration and transfer, qualification and production. Transphorm also presented a vendor seminar showing the latest update to its extended reliability testing,” stated Carl Blake, Marketing Advisor with Transphorm.

With this successful transfer to a much higher volume fabrication facility, the focus now shifts to ramping up the production to meet the rapidly growing demand for 600-V GaN HEMT devices. The application circuits being used to demonstrate the capabilities of Transphorm’s EZ GAN devices include: an All-in-One computer Power Supply for which Transphorm and ON Semiconductor are collaborating to bring a total integrated reference design to the customers; a three phase inverter and a Totem pole bridgeless PFC evaluation board that simplifies and speeds up the adoption of these GaN bases solutions into finished products.

“I’m truly fortunate to experience the rapid market adoption of new technology such as EZ GAN, which is similar to my previous experience with the HEXFETs in the early 1990s and the IGBTs in the later 1990s both of which were enabling customers to shrink the size of power conversion products while enabling higher efficiency solutions for the end user,” Blake observed. “This is especially important in Japan now due to the focused effort to eliminate nuclear reactors by reducing the energy consumption. This is driving increases interest in the Transphorm HEMTs to improve efficiency especially in PV Solar Inverters,” Blake concluded.