Gallium Nitride — The Silicon of the Future.
By: Uditansh Patel
Tags: Silicon, Chargers, Gallium Nitride, Silicon Valley, 5g Chipsets

Gallium Nitride — The Silicon of the Future.

Experts say that this compound is so potentially game-changing that if the entire world started adopting it, then worldwide power consumption could drop by 10 to 25%, and that’s not even factoring in all the other efficiency gains in future products. Uditansh Patel Nov 1, 2020·4 min read

Credits: UGREEN Blog

Battery life is, I’d say, the biggest bottleneck to today’s smartphone experience. And whilst there are new battery technologies on the horizon, chargers have just received a silent, but at the same time, completely game-changing update, and that’s the next best thing is to take a look at this new tech called Gallium Nitride.

I’ve seen this tech being scaled up by a company called RavPower. They’ve built a 45 Watt supercharger that’s half the size of a MacBook charger, and that’s not even the core bit, but before we can get to that, what’s going on here, you’ve probably heard of Silicon. Silicon is literally everywhere on this planet. It actually makes up about 25% of the Earth’s crust, and this abundance is mostly why it’s become the default choice for semiconductors, the building block for all kinds of electronic devices. Anyways, whilst silicon is still the default choice, we’ve now got a lot of areas like charging where we’re actually reaching the limits of how fast it can conduct electricity, which on one hand is seriously cold but on the other hand means that there’s got to be a material to replace it. Gallium Nitride is shaping up to be just that, and it is way faster. In fact, on a very theoretical level, this Gallium Nitrate tech that we’re seeing in these new generation chargers has the potential to conduct electricity 1,000 times more efficiently than silicon. These chargers are based on an entirely different architecture, which will undoubtedly lay the foundation for a massive leap forward. In fact, we shouldn’t forget that these are first-gen products, so undoubtedly, future iterations will be even more compact and even more powerful but wait… there’s more!

Silicon gets hot quickly, whereas Gallium Nitrate doesn’t, which means it’s not just less prone to well blowing up and so it’s safer, but it also wastes less energy. All the energy that has turned into heat with a traditional charger is the energy that’s not being used to charge your device. If you’ve ever laid hands on a small phone fast charger after it’s been in use, then you’ll know that that’s a fair bit of wastage.

Also, having this efficiency becomes even more important when you’re on the go when the size and weight become a bit more of a problem. So, get ready for power banks that are not just smaller and cooler but charge faster. Starting very soon, and when you combine this with the graphene battery tech that’s on its way, people in ten years will be laughing at the idea of carrying around something like power banks we know today.

Gallium Nitride has one more kind of surprising implication- cheaper chargers!

Because it can result in products with a smaller footprint, that means companies can spend less money on materials, less money on packaging, and therefore less on shipping their charges — not to mention that because of its improved efficiency, using a Gallium Nitride charger would also mean less power draw and a cheaper electricity bill.

Right now, there is a bit of a price premium, but that’s really because it’s just new tech, and well these companies have the power to, but as soon as it becomes a competitive market, those prices are going to fall straight down. This is a bit of a long shot, but if Apple started shipping its next-generation iPhones with a Gallium Nitride charger, and they built their phones to fully utilize this tech, then with no increase to the size of the packaging, you could be getting a charger that works up to six times faster than the current ones, and that’s really exciting. In fact, all of this is, but there’s a bigger picture here, but some of the experts are saying that this compound is so potentially game-changing that if the entire world started adopting it, then worldwide power consumption could drop by 10 to 25% and that’s not factoring in all the other efficiency gains future products will have and so the obvious spin-off of this is how fast can they build one of these chargers.