IR brings out the sparkling gems to whet buyers’ appetites

Imagine a successful jewelry shop that happens to be publicly traded. It does good business and has many happy customers, but times are tough and stock prices are low. A cash-rich company comes along and makes an offer for our happy little jewelry store, but the jewelry shop considers the offer much too low. The shop probably isn’t adverse to being bought, or at least is resigned to the fact that there’s a good probability it will happen in the prevailing economic climate. The little jewelry shop objects to the low offer, and the fact that no one else is jumping into the bidding.

What does our little jewelry shop do? It brings out all of its shiniest, most lovely items and puts them front and center in the display case so that its suitor will realize the true value of the store and, more to the point, other suitors attracted by the sparkling gems might enter into a bidding war.

The above scenario is what I thought of after hearing International Rectifier announce its GaN “platform”, which is a semiconductor process it touts as having game-changing higher power-density and higher efficiency than silicon, while still being cost-effective. IR is not the only company chasing GaN (as you can read in Paul Rako’s excellent roundup of last week.)

Michael Briere, VP of R&D at IR explained to me at this week’s Digital Power Forum that IR’s intellectual property includes being able to use a cheap, readily available silicon wafer to build the GaN circuit on, which lowers the cost without giving up performance gains, and also in being able to switch at much higher voltages than other GaN processes - after al it doesn’t do much good to do all your switching down in the sub-10V range. But again, Briere quickly admits that IR is not the only company doing work in this area of GaN and having success – several  Japanese companies in particular are pursuing GaN on silicon, although mostly at lower voltages. He claims IR’s real advantage lies in its overall power management expertise that will allow it to leverage GaN technology as no other company in the GaN space can.

The last “platform” I can remember IR introducing was for its iMotion line of motor control ICs, and the announcement included part numbers and prices, so this platform announcement seems unusually vague for IR, and a little on the early side. Briere says they expect to have samples at Electronica in November. That gives IR two months to polish the gems and who knows, maybe bring out some more jewels to whet Vishay’s appetite – and maybe some other bidders.