On Episode 73 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Simon Wainwright, president of Freebird Semiconductor, about solving power management problems with emerging technologies.
Tag: startup
The Future of the Space Industry: Gallium Nitride Semiconductors
On Episode 72 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Simon Wainwright, president of Freebird Semiconductor, about Gallium Nitride technology and the future of the space industry.
Show Notes
Freebird Semiconductor’s Website
Contact Freebird Semiconductor
Find Simon Wainwright on LinkedIn
What is GaN?
What is Moore’s Law?
How2 Cut The Power Cord: Wireless Power Is Ready For Prime Time
SPWG — Space Parts Working Group Conference 2018
Freebird Semiconductor to attend and present at 2018 Space Parts Working Group
The Aerospace Corporation
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment
Sections
What is Gallium Nitride?
How To Build Gallium Nitride
Computing Technology
The Future of Gallium Nitride Technology
The Space World Today
The Beginning of Freebird Semiconductors
How To Convince the Space Industry to Adopt New Technologies
How to Do Accelerated Life Testing
Gallium Nitride Semiconductors: The Future of the Space Industry
What is Gallium Nitride?
Paul: So now it’s gallium nitride.
Simon: That’s correct.
Paul: From my science in school, I’ve seen gallium, and nitride is…what is nitride?
Simon: It’s nitrogen. Basically, it’s gallium and nitrogen.
Paul: So you put them together.
Simon: Yeah. Put them together. One of each.
How To Build Gallium Nitride
Paul: So what do you do? Go to the store and buy a bucket of gallium? Or what is it? Is it a metal?
Simon: Well, no. They exhibit semiconductor properties when you join them together. So essentially you would still use a silicon handle wafer, which is basically just the base. Consider you’re building a house, let’s say. So you would use silicon wafer as the foundation, which basically does nothing, but it makes everything strong. So it has no functional role as you build onto that. And you gradually grow it. So you have a reactor, and you grow by atomic layer by atomic layer, and you grow the structure.
Paul: You do this with tweezers?
Simon: We do this at very high temperatures. So we basically grow it and we insert different gases into this chamber, and they react, and their natural state is to form gallium nitride. We put in dopants of different kinds to make, to change…
Paul: So you’ve figured out the process.
Simon: No. But we’ve figured out how to modify the process. So the process was figured out by EPC. So we’ve figured out how to modify that process.
Paul: People have all seen the sort of semiconductor circles with all the chips not cut out. So you take a wafer like that, and you’re collecting this by using gas. Is it diffusion?
Simon: Well, you basically grow different layers. So, if you can imagine, you’re building your house onto your silicon foundation.
Paul: Atomic layers.
Simon: Yeah, layer by layer.
Paul: So, one atom thick of gallium or nitride or is it together?
Simon: You start introducing different concentrations. And you gradually go from a pure silicon wafer to like a pure gallium nitride layer. So you gradually introduce it. There’s obviously a transition, a buffer region. But the real gallium nitride, pure gallium nitride layer, which where all the action of the transistor, is a couple of layers of atoms thick.
Paul: Wow. So it’s more like a peanut butter sandwich.
Simon: Absolutely.
Paul: I mean, the house is good, but it’s got to have no basement.
Simon: There you go.
Paul: So we got the bread, and we start putting peanut butter on. But we’re really putting peanut butter and jelly. And by the time we get to a certain thickness, it’s perfect mixture of peanut butter and jelly. So you’re really in the sandwich-making business.
Simon: They wouldn’t fill you up. They’re very thin.
Paul: They’re very thin. But how can something so thin switch electrons. Do you do any other things to them?
Simon: Well basically, this gets really technical. We confine the layer of gallium nitride to be so thin that you form what’s called a quantum well.
Paul: Sounds cool.
Simon: Sounds really good. So if you go into atom-sized dimensions of everything, then you get quantum physics starts kicking in and you confine a load of carriers into a very very small space, and you increase the mobility of those carriers. So that way, they can travel through the semiconductor a lot quicker. And our components are actually called HEMTs — high electron mobility transistors because of that.
Paul: Alright. And so then what’s the next step? So you’ve got these wafers, and you’ve succeeded in putting how many atomic layers are there?
Simon: I couldn’t really say that.
Paul: Okay, so that’s a secret.
Simon: Somebody would kill me. I’m not sure who. But somebody would kill me if I said that.
Paul: So it’s more than one and less than a billion or whatever.
Simon: There you go.
Paul: I don’t know. A billion wouldn’t probably even show up. But it’s an atomic layer, so you’ve got this sandwich. So then what do you do? Slice these up and put them in packages?
Simon: Basically, you need to put the third electrodes. So at either end of this very thin layer, you have a source and drain. That’s where the current flows between, in and out. And then you have to have a control contact, which, in this case, is called a gate. When you open the gate, you allow the electrons to flow from in to out. And essentially that is a transistor. So the Jell-O, if you like, on the top, is the gate. The technology with that is, there’s a lot of physics involved. There’s a lot of technology involved to enable that to work correctly, so to speak.
Paul: Sort of make it all happen. So then the application of power to that gate can be faster, switched faster. So and we’re talking very small amounts of time here, even in a regular transistor. So if you take a silicon transistor and you apply power to the gate, what’s the switching time?
Simon: I mean, it varies. There’s lot of different configurations but I’ll give you the limitations of the switching time. So the switching time is determined by charge. You have charge on the gate and charge on the drain and the source. So the more charge you have to move during your switching operation. So the lower the gate charge or the drain charge or whatever, the better, the faster you can move it, because you have less things to move. So that’s basically what determines the switching time of a transistor, any transistor. So if we can compare apples with apples, a radiation-hardened silicon MOSFET, which is the silicon way of implementing this, to an enhancement-mode GaN, HEMT, our gate charge is an order of magnitude lower. An order of magnitude lower.
Computing Technology
Paul: So now does this have any application in actually computing technology?
Simon: Absolutely.
Paul: Because that’s the point, we’ve got to get things to switch quickly. So that’s cool. Is there a projection in somebody’s mind out there for the impact of computers being faster because of this?
Simon: Absolutely. I mean, you’ve heard of Moore’s Law, where I think it’s every 18 months the size of electronics reduces by half. So this will actually permit that to continue because silicon has really gotten to…
Paul: We’ve squeezed as much as we can out of it.
The Future of Gallium Nitride Technology
Simon: Yeah, to its fundamental limits. On this is more on the commercial side, not related as much to our product. But certainly more on the commercial side, the founder of EPC, Dr. Alex Lidow, has predicted that Moore’s Law will continue. Some of us like to now call it Lidow’s Law.
Paul: Interesting. So does that mean, and again, I am not holding you to this. Is this five years from now I’ll see computers doing this? When am I going to go to the store and buy a computer that’s a magnitude faster because of this technology?
Simon: At this point, I’m not able to tell you that because my world is the power world rather than the digital world. So, I don’t really know how fast it’s going to be adopted in the digital world.
Paul: How about in the power supply world?
Simon: The power supply world, it’s here already. You’ll see new products coming out, to put it directly into people’s lives. You’ll see that you can actually cut the cord. You can throw away wires because you can remote charge most things. You will be able to remote charge most things.
Paul: So it’s not wishful thinking.
Simon: Oh, no. It’s actually happening.
Paul: Because we’ve heard a lot about wireless charging and all that, but it doesn’t work all that well, and it’s sort of working, but it’s not. So you’re saying it’s prime for market betterment.
Simon: Absolutely. I mean, I have a Samsung. I have the pad. I replaced the Samsung. So gallium nitride is not actually used in the Samsung or even the Apple remote charging things at the moment. But it will be in the future. It will have to be incorporated.
Paul: And what does that make it? Does it make it charge faster?
Simon: Makes it charge faster.
Paul: Further away?
Simon: I’m not sure about that. I’m not as familiar with that technology to give you stats and distances and things like that. But it’s certainly faster. It’s more efficient, and, you know, it would enable you to charge higher powers rather than just a phone. You can actually run a laptop on a desk. You’d have a charger pad underneath it. You just put the laptop or whatever.
The Space World Today
Paul: Alright. So now in the space world, there’s all these people putting satellites. Is it just satellites? I mean, there’s a few missions outside of our planet, I would imagine. But the majority of it is satellites, or is there other stuff in the space world?
Simon: I would say there’s satellites. There’s space exploration vehicles, the ones that go to different planets.
Paul: Have you made it into any space exploration vehicles yet that you can talk about?
Simon: We’re working on one. Let’s leave it at that.
Paul: And do you work with any aliens yet?
Simon: No. Some of the guys back at the office.
The Beginning of Freebird Semiconductors
Paul: The market there is huge, I tell you. That’s just incredible! So you guys started this and you’re on the North Shore here in Massachusetts. What does that look like over the next three years? How does your company grow? Are you commercialized? Are you shipping? What are the next sort of milestones?
Simon: Okay. So let me go back to when we founded it. So we spent a year basically developing our product portfolio to making sure. We had to do a bunch of testing, do radiation testing. We do electrical testing. We do temperature testing. We do a plethora of different kinds of tests. So we spent a year, 18 months getting to that point. And that never ends. We have to continue to test, continue to push the boundaries of the technology so that we know where it fails, why it fails, how it fails.
Paul: And then how to fix it.
Simon: And how to fix it. If you know that, then you can determine the lifetime of that. But the bulk of that work was done in the first 18 months. Then we sort of came out of the closet, so to speak, and we went public. We came out, out of hiding, so to speak, after year one, essentially. At the end of year one. And we presented to the industry at a conference called SPWG — Space Parts Working Group over in California. This is sponsored by the aerospace corporation, which is one of the, I would say, like a regulatory body sort of thing. And people there were NASA, the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, and then all of the guys that build satellites — so Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop, all of the prime contractors are there. So we came out at that.
Paul: Was it a surprise to them?
Simon: There was a lot of interest. Let’s just put it that way. There was a lot of interest at that point.
Paul: So I’m a designer in the satellite world. You’ve just given me new tools.
Simon: I’ve just given you a new solution.
Paul: So this is like, “Okay. I’ve got to redesign all my power supplies.”
How To Convince the Space Industry to Adopt New Technologies
Simon: Well firstly, there’s a lot more work that has to be done before anybody that is remotely involved in space will actually adopt your technology. Firstly, you have to convince them. Bear in mind that the technology for space has not changed in 30 years, since the lunar landings and all the Apollo missions. So you have to break down resistance to change first in a lot of these companies. And the only way to do that in this space industry, which is an extremely cautious industry, the only way to do that is with data.
So we had to go through our portfolio, and we had to test everything. Every single device that we ship goes through an individual screening program. Some parts get tested for 2,000 hours, for instance.
Paul: This is a part you’re going to ship.
Simon: Oh, yeah.
Paul: So it’s not just one sample.
Simon: Oh, no, no. Everything that we ship has been tested, 100%, at various different levels of stringency. So our second major goal was to break down the barriers of acceptance on this new technology into a world that had been dominated by silicon.
Paul: So it’s really marketing. I mean, it’s marketing with backup.
Simon: It’s marketing and engineering. Yeah.
Paul: But you’re talking to an engineer, and an engineer isn’t going to take that risk without compelling evidence.
Simon: Yeah. Absolutely.
Paul: Just like you’re not going to buy the car unless you like it. So you’re breaking down those barriers to entry or barriers to integration, I guess.
Simon: And essentially, you, you go through all of the data that they would require, and then you show them, once they’re satisfied that you’ve gotten to a point of reliability that they need, then you have to show them that the performance is worth it. So they’re not going to put anything in there that’s going to break after five years. So then you’ve got to show them. Then the sales end starts. Then you have to differentiate your product with switching performance or the losses or whatever somebody is specifically interested in for their specific design.
So at that point, then the sales effort starts to communicate all of those differences. So you have to have in your back pocket, one, a bunch of radiation testing, two, a bunch of life testing, reliability testing, and then — only then — once they’ve seen that data and believed that data can you then start trying to sell the product. So there’s a lot of upfront work, and there’s a lot of barriers to entry into this market.
Paul: Yeah, I could imagine. So do you give them samples?
Simon: Wherever we can, we try to sell them samples.
Paul: Well, okay. Alright.
Simon: But yes. We’ve been known to give a few away.
Paul: So they’re actually trying it and, and playing with it. It’s not like just a piece of paper.
Simon: No, no, no. Most, most of the major satellite companies in the world have Freebird parts that they are testing at this point.
How to Do Accelerated Life Testing
Paul: So now, you talked about radiation testing and life testing. So how do you do life testing? Just for the average person, you’re not going to be alive in 90 years or 100 years, how do you tell if this is going to—
Simon: So we do accelerated testing. So basically, what we do is, we increase temperatures or increase voltages — whatever is sensitive during the lifetime of a component — and we put more of that than it would normally see. So we try and accelerate the aging process. So, for instance, a very easy example to understand is temperature. So we would test our parts for a thousand hours at the temperature of 150 degrees. Okay?
Paul: Fahrenheit or Celsius?
Simon: Celsius.
Paul: Okay. So that’s pretty warm.
Simon: You’re going to have to convert that into F.
Paul: Yeah, sorry. Okay.
Simon: It’s been a while since I did that. So, you’d leave that on with a bias, or you have your in and your out, your source and your drain, so you bias the drain at 80% of its rated voltage, and you leave it on test, continuously energized for a thousand hours, which is eight weeks, more or less. But the fact that you’ve done that at temperature, allows you, with statistics, to predict an accelerated aging, so to speak. So you get a lot into statistics.
Paul: It’s burning. You’d burn your fingers.
Simon: It’s 320 maybe.
Paul: Okay. So you’d burn your fingers. But isn’t space cold?
Simon: Space is cold, but we’re not trying to simulate space. We’re trying to accelerate the aging process.
Paul: I see. So basically, you’re stressing the technology. What about freezing tests?
Simon: Well, when you say, “Is space cold?” it depends where you are in space. If you have a direct line to the sun or, so are you on the bright side or the dark side of the moon, so to speak. When you’re in the dark side, you’re at minus 50-something C. If you’re on the bright side, you may be at 80 degrees C.
So we also go through thermal cycles. We have a chamber which has an elevator, basically a small elevator. It goes between an oven and a fridge.
Paul: Oh really? Oh, that’s cool.
Simon: It’s great.
Paul: You can put a soda in there, and you can cool it off really fast.
Simon: When we have office parties, we put the pizza in the warmness and the beer in the cold.
Paul: There you go. So you’re doing this, and you’re doing it from, I guess, a compliance level where you’re actually testing it and certifying it and making sure that it’s true so that people can track that all back.
More Episodes:
You’ve been listening to Part 2 of our conversation with Simon Wainwright! If you missed Part 1, you can find it here! To listen to Part 3, you can find it here!
Also published on Medium.
Semiconductor Manufacturing With Entrepreneur Simon Wainwright
On Episode 71 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Simon Wainwright, president of Freebird Semiconductor, about how he started a company to manufacture semiconductors using GaN technology!
Show Notes
Freebird Semiconductor’s Website
Contact Freebird Semiconductor
Find Simon Wainwright on LinkedIn
Space X – A private company that manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft
What’s So Special About Low Earth Orbit?
OneWeb: Bringing global, satellite-based internet services to Earth through a constellation of satellites
Project Loon: Balloon Powered Internet For Everyone
What is a Transistor?
What is GaN?
Link to SaviorLabs Assessment
Sections
Introduction
Starting a Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
About Simon Wainwright
A Team of Entrepreneurs
Starting a Company From Ground Zero
The Risks – Believing in Your Company From Day One
The Execution of a Business Idea
What on Earth is Going on In Space Right Now?
The Market for Satellites and Small Constellations
What Are Constellations Doing Right Now?
What is a Semiconductor?
The Market for Semiconductors
Wireless Charging With Gallium Nitride Technology
More Episodes
Semiconductor Manufacturing with Simon Wainwright
Introduction
Paul: Hello. Today I’m here with Simon Wainwright. President of Freebird Semiconductor out of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Simon: Hi. Good afternoon, Paul. How are you?
Paul: Welcome. Thank you for coming in.
Simon: No problem.
Paul: So we met probably two years ago now?
Simon: Yeah, I’d say so. Yeah.
Paul: And you were starting a new semiconductor company.
Simon: That’s correct. Yeah.
Starting a Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
Paul: You know, our audience is quite diverse. You’ve got just normal people that have no idea what a semiconductor is to really technical people that can probably build semiconductors. Some of your competitors are people that we work in the same realm in manufacturing world. Why did you start a semiconductor manufacturing company? And how long has it been? Two years, three years now?
Simon: Yes, it’s been alive now for about two years, eight months. Something like that.
Paul: So what was the inflection point? What caused you to say, “Yeah, I’m going to start a semiconductor manufacturing company”?
Simon: It was the advantages of the technology. We work with gallium nitride, which is an emerging technology. It’s been around in the research realms for about ten, fifteen years. And then maybe in mainstream RF, or radio frequency type circuits for a little bit longer than it has been into the main power markets. But we had a relationship with the CEO and founder of another company called Efficient Power Conversion who is actually our foundry supplier of gallium nitride. And the technology just has advantages that make it… It really is an offer we couldn’t turn down. We can make things smaller, faster, more efficient and cheaper.
About Simon Wainwright
Paul: Okay. Well let’s get into that a little bit. So first of all, before we do that, what’s your background? I can tell you’re not from Boston.
Simon: I’m from Old England.
Paul: Old England. That’s right. Not New England. Okay. That’s a good point.
Simon: That’s right. So I’m from the UK. I studied electrical engineering, electronic engineering, at the University of Liverpool. I followed that through with a PhD in silicon uninsulated technology, believe it or not, which is now mainstream. Then I moved to Spain, my personal life took me to Spain for 20 years where I was a partner in one of the semiconductor companies in Spain as well.
Paul: So this is right in your wheelhouse.
Simon: Absolutely. Yeah.
Paul: So it wasn’t like you were a baker and you say, I’m going to wake up and I’m going to make semiconductors today.
Simon: Oh, no, no, no. I’ve always been involved in semiconductors in one form or another.
Paul: Okay. And what brought you to New England?
Simon: Basically, in my Spanish company, I was trying to sell to an American company, and they said, “Hey, we don’t want to buy your chips, but we want to hire you.” So I got a job with this company, and they ultimately brought me over about six years ago now.
Paul: So you’re relatively new to the United States.
Simon: Yeah, I’m very new.
Paul: Alright. Have you always been in New England, or did you live somewhere else?
Simon: Always here. Strangely enough, the Spanish company had an office in Andover, which is just down the road from Haverhill where we are located now. So I’ve had an association with the area for 25 years.
A Team of Entrepreneurs
Paul: Okay. Cool. So you didn’t just sort of sit up one day and say, “Hey I’m going to do this.” You didn’t do it alone. You have a key team, I would imagine.”
Simon: Yes, yes.
Paul: And who are some of the people on that and also what are their roles?
Simon: So basically, there are three founders. And we each cover distinct areas of the business. So myself, I cover a little bit of the technical stuff, with my background, obviously, but I’m also in charge of the actual general management of the business itself. So I have an MBA as well that helps towards that. So basically, just the general running of the company’s accounting stuff.
Paul: Day to day.
Simon: Yeah, the day-to-day stuff. Then we have a couple of other partners, the other founders. One is a technical guy who has been 25 years in the industry doing radiation-hardened MOSFETs, which is a similar product. It’s not the same but a similar product. So we call him the chief radiation officer.
Paul: CRO?
Simon: The CRO. The CRO, yeah. So we have our product portfolio, which we’ll get into a little bit later. It’s very much radiation hardened, so we wanted to make an emphasis on that. Therefore, he got that title. And then we had the other founder,Jim. He, basically, is an industry veteran. He’s been through many different larger companies. He’s had his own small company as well, a sales company. And he’s in charge of sales, marketing and sort of like the product strategies.
Starting a Company From Ground Zero
Paul: I see. So now is this your first startup from ground zero?
Simon: Yes, from ground zero, yes. I’ve had other businesses, but from ground zero, this was the biggest bite I’ve taken out of the apple.
Paul: Okay. How is it? The, the entrepreneurial side?
Simon: Oh, the entrepreneurial side? It’s good. It’s good.
Paul: You like it? So you get energy from that?
Simon: Oh, absolutely! Yeah, I would never go back and work for anybody.
Paul: Yeah. I like to say that people don’t understand entrepreneurs very well, but you wake up every Monday, and you’re not employed. You don’t have a job. If you don’t get up, nobody is going to do it.
Simon: Absolutely.
Paul: Do you find that to be the case?
Simon: Absolutely. I think sometimes, I don’t even go to bed. It seems like that.
Paul: That’s a good way to put it.
Alright. So you’re in New England working for a company that sort of brought you over to help them. What came across your desk, or was it you had an epiphany or that said, “I’m going to go in and start a semiconductor company in this particular technology”?
Simon: We’d seen this in the industry. It had been around in the industry, but it was very marginal on the outskirts of technology. And then there was a reorganization we did in the company that we worked for. All three of us worked at the same company.
Paul: Oh, okay. That’s good.
Simon: So there, there was a reorganization, and it just felt like the right time. So it was we didn’t want to go in the direction that that company went into, and we wanted to follow this path.
The Risks – Believing in Your Company From Day One
Paul: Right. But, I mean, there’s a lot of technologies that come out that don’t prove out. Was there a huge risk, or were you at the point was it past the tipping point of it proving out?
Simon: It had gone through its initial preliminary stages where you knew it was going to work. I’m not sure the tipping point. There was still a lot of work that we’ve done in the last two years that’s maybe taken it to the tipping point now.
Paul: Okay. But you took a big risk.
Simon: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Paul: So, because it could have been, “Oh, we can’t solve these problems.”
Simon: Yes, absolutely. It could have been. It was a major risk. Ask my wife about that. She’ll confirm that.
Paul: You did what? You did what?
Simon: Spent the college fund on what?
Paul: Well, that’s key to….Or just everybody’s entrepreneurial experience, there’s a point at which it looks like it’s never going to work. And you persevere through that, and hopefully it will work, and then hopefully it’s scalable.
Simon: I don’t think that that’s fully the case in my case at least. I believed in it from day one. If you don’t believe in it, you don’t take that risk.
Paul: Sure. But you, but that risk is there.
Simon: Oh, absolutely.
Paul: You may have an irrational belief, but you proved out now that it was rational.
Simon: Absolutely.
The Execution of a Business Idea
Paul: Okay. So you’re past that failure point. Imminent failure point. So now it’s the execution of developing it. So where are you in that? We’ll get into what the products actually do, but you took an idea that was a concept or a set of processes probably, and refined those so that they would produce what you had hoped they would produce.
Simon: Correct. It was essentially that the guy that we worked with, with Efficient Power Conversation, he has a product. So we thought we can make that product better and specifically direct it towards the space and high reliability market. And that’s a market that the EPC was not interested in getting into fully because they didn’t want the hassle of supporting, a Boeing, a Northrop Grumman, any of these large prime subcontractors that ask for reams and reams of data.
What on Earth is Going on In Space Right Now?
Paul: To what end? Alright, well first of all, there’s a bunch to peel back here for the general listener I think. So, you say you supply stuff to the space industry. You didn’t even say aerospace.
Simon: No. It’s space.
Paul: Space. Now I am pretty technically savvy and interested in it, and I follow SpaceX and all this stuff. But that doesn’t seem to be that many things going into space. Or maybe I’m just ignorant.
Simon: Oh, there are, there are tons of things going on in space at the moment. Now is space’s watershed moment, so it’s the space revolution, I would say, at the moment.
Paul: And but, this is for near-earth objects or is that the words?
Simon: It’s LEO, low Earth orbit. So they’re the ones that are closer. And then there’s medium Earth orbit, and then…
Paul: So is this like tens of things are going on in space or hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands?
Simon: You’d be surprised how many launches. There are launches every week I would say. Yeah, yeah. I would say that satellites buzzing around up there at the moment, it’s impossible to put an exact number on them. And this is in the public domain. There’s a number of constellations that are coming out now. So take, for instance, a commercial constellation called OneWeb. You may have heard that they just broke ground down in Florida. They have a conglomeration between Airbus… Richard Branson’s involved in it. There’s a number of things. Softbank has funded this. And there’s a revolution at the moment in the space industry. And OneWeb is just one of the constellations.
Paul: And by constellation, you mean multiple satellites working together?
Simon: Absolutely. So it’s like a network in space essentially. So there are a number of projects for this type of constellation. So they would launch nearly 800 satellites at a very low altitude, so the low Earth orbit.
Paul: What is that? Just for listeners.
Simon: I wouldn’t be able to give you the actual height. I could look it up. I don’t have it on the top of my mind, but it’s basically the closest you can get to earth without actually falling through the atmosphere. So it’s not very high. That’s why they need more to cover more areas of the globe.
Paul: Because the distance isn’t as far.
Simon: Yeah, so that the longer ones, the higher altitude sate—, satellite such as the geostationary. They would stay over the same point, but they would cover more because the cone of coverage comes down and covers more area on the earth’s surface.
Paul: And I know we’re getting off track here. But why wouldn’t I put up a higher one?
Simon: It’s more expensive. Firstly, you have to get it higher.
Paul: Really that’s the expense?
Simon: For rockets and it’s exposed to more harsh atmospheres up there. So you get more radiation. It’s closer to the radiation sources. It’s closer to the sun and so on.
Paul: So there’s like a sweet spot.
Simon: I wouldn’t say there’s a sweet spot.
Paul: Or many sweet spots?
Simon: The higher you go, the more radiation hardened you need. The lower you go, the more tolerant you can be with radiation.
Paul: I would have never thought. Okay. So that’s a cool thing to sort of look up, is to go and look at all these different projects that are going on for all the lower Earth orbit stuff. So… Okay, so there’s a lot in the space world.
The Market for Satellites and Small Constellations
Simon: Yeah. So I mean, basically, there’s been a shift from the small constellations with geostationary satellites, with the high altitude, and they have to have lifetimes of 15-year mission expectancy.
Paul: Yeah. Because you can’t call a repair…
Simon: Exactly. You can’t send a guy over there with a wrench to fix it.
Paul: It’s very expensive. It’s just too expensive to do that, yeah.
Simon: So basically, the, the commercial level of satellites at the moment, which is all these LEO constellations, these very commercial constellations, is changing the market. It’s revolutionizing the markets at the moment. So it’s a little bit like Henry Ford did with cars, you know. You could make tons of these things. They’re almost, you can use them and throw them away. That sort of thing.
What Are Constellations Doing Right Now?
Paul: I see. So let’s take another detour. We’re getting further away. But what are they doing with these constellations? What application?
Simon: So, one of the typical applications is communication. So it’s basically internet via space. You may have heard of project Loon from Google. I’m not sure whether that’s still going on or not with balloons. They wanted high altitude balloons. So this essentially uses these new commercial constellations. They link together, and they form a network. It’s almost like the old cell phone towers, if you like, but it’s, you know, with no towers and no wires on the ground.
So it can give absolute coverage all over the globe for internet access. You get your internet access via satellite. So in the case of what’s just happened — the hurricanes down in Texas and Florida and the Caribbean — it doesn’t matter if your cell tower falls over.
Paul: Yeah, it’s a paradigm shift.
Simon: So it’s a major revolution in the way that we communicate as well.
Paul: Okay. Is this really the differentiator in your products, the radiation hardening of it?
Simon: I would say between our products, which is radiation-hardened gallium nitride, and normal gallium nitride, absolutely. It’s the radiation hardness. But between GaN, per se, and other technologies such as silicon, we have far more superior performance. We have faster switching times and lower losses.
What is a Semiconductor?
Paul: So what are you making? I mean, are they transistors? Are they integrated circuits?
Simon: So we make transistors. Everybody is familiar with the transistor radio. Basically, it’s a switch where you turn things on, and you turn things off with a piece of semiconductor.
Paul: 2N222.
Simon: There you, there you go.
Paul: 22-22.
Simon: That’s an old silicon technology, which is still going. So there’s nothing wrong with it.
Paul: So, okay. So for, for our listeners that aren’t electronics people, it’s like you have a light switch. A transistor is a switch. Check me on this.
Simon: That’s correct. Yeah.
Paul: It’s a switch. But the toggle is another like electric field. So you connect something to the toggle, and it lets it flow or not flow?
Simon: Exactly.
Paul: And that’s why it’s called a semiconductor because it conducts under one circumstance and then another circumstance it doesn’t. Hold on. So, I had thought everything moved to ICs.
Simon: No.
Paul: You know, with millions of transistors on the ICs. So you’re saying that there’s still applications for just individual transistors.
The Market for Semiconductors
Simon: Yep. Absolutely. We call them discrete components so that there’s absolutely a market for that at the moment. And the way that there is a market for that is it depends on the application. So the ICs that you’re talking about will basically be digital functions, like processors or things like that.
Paul: Yes, no.
Simon: Absolutely. So what we do with our discrete devices, the individual transistors, is that we manage the flow of power. So we are dedicated, really, towards providing solutions for the power management of the satellite. So to give you an idea, you’ve seen the wings of a satellite with the solar panels. So they gather energy from the sun, feed that through to a converter on the actual body of the satellite itself, and then basically, that raw energy has to be converted into — I don’t know — five volts or 3.3 volts or a test that amplifies something.
Paul: Voltage regulators.
Simon: So basically, you can use our discrete transistors in all of these power-supply-based circuits.
Paul: Okay. So I could use silicon to do that.
Simon: You can use silicon.
Paul: So if we were sitting here on Earth, which we are, and we were going to build a power supply that converted the sun energy to 5-volt, 12-volt, whatever it might be, and regulate that so it doesn’t change and we could build it with a lot of different things. I could go out and get an IC to do that. But when I fly that into space, certain problems start to happen.
Simon: Yes. So when you go into space, you have to take into account that the parameters of these transistors can change with… If you receive doses of radiation. There’s no atmosphere there, so radiation can easily attack your electronics. So that’s the first advantage of using our products, which we’ve modified sufficiently so that they are radiation hardened.
Paul: And is that just the case of it, or is it actually the actual innards of…?
Simon: It’s the innards. The innards of the semiconductor itself.
Paul: So they’re not affected as much by radiation.
Simon: Correct. That is absolutely correct.
Paul: And, is it like a 2% difference, or is it like a 50% difference?
Simon: It’s like night and day.
Paul: So it’s a game changer.
Simon: Yeah, oh absolutely a game changer.
Paul: So what did we do before this technology?
Simon: So before this technology, we had silicon. Silicon, basically, which has its limitations, so you have to do a lot of derating. You have to use them way below their stated voltages so that the radiation doesn’t really affect it. So you have to over-design these things.
Paul: And make them bigger, I imagine.
Simon: Make them bigger. Size gets huge.
Paul: Probably more shielding and things like that.
Simon: Yep. You can put shielding around the actual circuitry itself and not just the component but the circuitry itself. And there’s another element to using gallium nitride as well. Not only have we managed to achieve radiation hardness with it, but intrinsically, the material itself, the gallium nitride material, is far better than silicon anyway. So just going back to your previous example on the ground, if we wanted to build a power supply or a converter or something like that on the ground where we don’t even worry about radiation hardened effects, we could still make those circuits way more efficient.
Paul: So actual efficiency. I’m building a power supply that’s 50% efficient, yours would be 60%? I know there’s a lot of parameters, but I’m just saying…
Simon: There’s a lot of parameters, but we can easily outstrip the state-of-the-art silicon.
Paul: Well, that’s going to be a huge issue in computers. The biggest problem in computers is getting the power to them.
Simon: Yeah. Absolutely.
Paul: And so there’s a market there as well.
Wireless Charging With Gallium Nitride Technology
Simon: You will see that some of the commercial applications that EPC is, is pursuing are smaller bricks essentially, power supply bricks. The smaller ones of those. Even the remote charging. You can do remote charging because gallium nitride switches way faster than any silicon technology. So you can get the wireless charging. It’s also advantageous for things like LIDAR. So it will revolutionize the autonomous vehicles because it can scan, and it has vision systems that are way more detailed than the standard silicon-based technology.
So it really it’s a GaN revolution at the moment. It’s a GaN revolution.
More Episodes:
You’ve been listening to Part 1 of our interview with Simon Wainwright. You can listen to part 2 of our conversation, here! We’ll be talking about the future of the space industry!
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