Gallium nitride is the silicon of the future

theverge.com

2 pointsKirinDave2 comments

Earlier this week I saw an ad for a very, very small power supply rated at 45W [0] and I thought it was a scam, but upon research it turns out there is a major paradigm shift delivered via chemistry in both passive and active electrical components developing.

This is not a promotion for the device, mind you. Just that we're abut to see a ton of demonstrably better electronics enter the market.

This has major implications for a lot of things, including much more efficient data center design and much more compact SBCs and phones.

[0]: https://www.ravpower.com/p/ravpower-45w-type-c-pd-wall-charg...

Yeah. I read a great dead tree article (Probably Bob Pease) that pointed out that the heat dissipation in power supplies is proportional to inefficiency not efficiency. If you got from 90% efficient to 95% your required heat dissipation is cut in half. The other metric is transformer size drops radically with increasing frequency.

There is a wall where higher switching speed runs into the turn on/off time of the power transistor. Efficiency drops and the power transistors get too hot.

These devices are moving that wall to ever higher frequencies. Being able to run hotter and faster means much smaller power supplies.

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