EPC

More About EPC

EPC Corporation was founded in November 2007 by three engineers with a combined 60 years experience in advanced power management devices.

EPC’s CEO, Alex Lidow, is the co-inventor of the HEXFET™ power MOSFET and, in addition to holding positions in R&D, and manufacturing, was the CEO of International Rectifier for 12 years. For over 35 years it has been Alex Lidow’s mission to create new semiconductors that improve our ability to efficiently convert and use energy.

At the time of the founding of EPC, it became clear to the three founders that silicon had reached performance limits. At that time, a possible candidate to displace silicon was gallium nitride, but there were significant problems in cost and device capability. The initial EPC team vowed to develop GaN products that could be used as cost effective power MOSFET replacements which would require innovation in manufacturing, material science, and applying device physics.

In June 2009, EPC delivered the first commercial enhancement mode GaN transistors (eGaN®) that were manufactured in a low-cost foundry in Taiwan used to produce standard silicon CMOS product.

With this milestone reached, EPC, and the entire power management industry, has begun a new journey that holds great promise for a step function of new value added possibilities for the users.

The potential market for EPC’s product is large and fast-growing. The key product areas are voltage controllers such as point-of-load converters, LED boost converters, power MOSFET and IGBT replacements, and RF applications such as power amplifiers for cell phones and base stations.

In order to make EPC’s eGaN transistors easy to use, we developed devices that behave very much like silicon power MOSFETs. This allows experienced designers to leverage their knowledge of power MOSFET design to achieve greater performance than possible in the past.

EPC introduced 10 part numbers in 2009, EPC1001 through EPC1015. These parts cover applications requiring 200V and below. By the end of 2010, we expect about 90% of the applications for power MOSFETs to be successfully addressed with eGaN transistors from EPC.

In those applications where greater efficiency, less space, or operation at much higher frequencies is needed, GaN will quickly displace traditional power MOSFETs. We believe that EPC will be the one to break down these barriers and liberate the engineer from the constraints of silicon.