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Monthly Archives: August 2023

Rohm integrates driver with GaN hemt to remove gate voltage woes

Rohm BM3G015MUV-LB GaN hemt and driver

Rohm has co-packaged a gate driver and a 650V GaN power transistor to ease the design of power supplies in servers and ac adaptors. “While GaN hemts are expected to contribute to greater miniaturisation and improved power conversion efficiency, the difficulty in handling the gate compared to silicon mosfets requires the use of a dedicated gate driver,” according to the ...

BorgWarner gets SiC power from ST as well as Onsemi

BorgWarner-SiC-vehicle traction Inverter

Only a few weeks ago Onsemi announced that its silicon carbide power transistors are to be used in BorgWarner Viper electric vehicle traction inverters, and now STMicroelectronics has revealed something similar. “STMicroelectronics will supply BorgWarner with third-generation 750V silicon carbide power mosfet die for their proprietary Viper-based power module,” according to ST. “This power module is used in BorgWarner’s traction ...

Fable: The Company With No Revenue Which Hit The Jackpot

37 years ago a company was founded which designed microprocessors which ran the x86 instruction set on a RISC architecture. The company was not initially funded by VCs but by two computer companies. IBM fabbed its chips. For its first eight years it had no revenues. Eight years after it was founded it was sold for $850 million. Moral: There’s ...

Toshiba adds four-pin SiC mosfet to cut losses

Toshiba 4pin TO-247 mosfet switching on

Toshiba has picked a four-pin package for its latest third-generation silicon carbide mosfets. “Devices in the TWxxxZxxxC series are the first Toshiba SiC products to be housed in a TO-247-4L(X) package with a fourth pin,” according to the company. “This allows the provision of a Kelvin connection of the signal source terminal for the gate drive, thereby reducing the parasitic ...

Taming a promising, but flaky, solar perovskite

TokyoTech stablised perovskite

A cubic perovskite α-formamidinium lead iodide known as ‘α-FAPbI3‘ would be a promising solar cell material if it did not gradually turn into useless δ-FAPbI3 at room temperature under the influence of, of all things, light. Water has the same effect. “Solar cells made of α-FAPbI3 exhibit a 25.8% conversion efficiency and an energy gap of 1.48eV, specifications that are ...

VC fund for early stage photonic startups

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Photon Ventures has launched a VC fund aimed at early-stage photonic chip startups and scale ups. €60 million was raised in its first financing round with PhotonDelta as the lead investor alongside numerous private investors.  PhotonVentures plans to raise a total of €100 to €150 million, with its final close set for the start of 2024. It will prioritise Series ...

US NIST asks cryptographic community to review standards for quantum resistant algorithms

IBM quantum computer qubits

Last year, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) selected four algorithms designed to withstand attack by quantum computers. Now the agency has begun the process of standardizing these algorithms — the final step before making these mathematical tools available so that organisations around the world can integrate them into their encryption infrastructure. This week NIST released draft ...

Q2 O-RAN revenue falls

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O-RAN and vRAN revenues declined in W2 2Q23, marking the first quarter of y-o-y contraction since 2019, says Dell’Oro. “After a couple of years where Open RAN revenues exceeded expectations and advanced at an accelerated pace, the current slowdown doesn’t come as a surprise,” says Dell’Oro vp Stefan Pongratz,  “projections for 2023 were more tempered, considering that it would take ...