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Comment by alephnerd | Hacker News Reader

GaN semiconductors are heavily used in military and space applications like Radar, Lasers, and Power ICs.

The US has recently been subsidizing the development of an alternative supply chain for GaN and other similar semiconductor in Japan (eg. the TI announcement), India [0], Phillipines [1], Australia [2], etc

[0] - https://www.state.gov/new-partnership-with-india-to-explore-...

[1] - https://www.csis.org/analysis/new-trilateral-chapter-united-...

[2] - https://www.ussc.edu.au/expanding-the-national-security-inno...

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Its also quite popular with commercial electronics

https://www.belkin.com/products/product-resources/gan-charge...

I can't wait for the day that we can get GaN replacement adapters for all of our old vintage electronics. Its such a cool technology. We have SSD replacements for spinning disks, HDMI and OLED mods for video and now the final frontier: old terrible non switch mode (or even early switch mode) PSU replaced with GaN supplies.

Can't we do that now? There's already a cottage industry of replacement power supplies in the vintage computing and video game sphere, I would imagine GaN products will dominate that space eventually.

Seems like there is a lack of power supply design expertise there, maybe due to certification requirements or possibly just the margins on a replacement PSU is much less than something like a flash cart or HDMI solution. I personally wouldn't dare to design a PSU: I would probably burn my house down.

My hope is that certified designs that target various DC voltages will cover a lot of use cases.

EDIT: Oh sorry I misread your comment. You are claiming there is a large selection already? I don't see it as often as I see other 'mods'. Are you speaking about any particular vintage computing/gaming community in particular? For consoles all I see is junk coming out of China. I've been burned too many times by that.

Its not quite turnkey, but USB PD (maybe with PPS, which lets the device specify voltage and current directly instead of simply picking a profile) from a known good manufacturer, and a trigger board (crapshoot there unfortunately) covers 99% of stuff.

Also, You can buy SMPS modules on mouser or digikey now for under $10. Or if you're lucky jameco will have it.

Sometimes even rotten chinese garbage can be useful- I have a portable USB supply for my DSLR that was originaly powered by seriously unsafe means- but the battery drm/sensor fakeout is good, so I just used the 9v USB-PD profile and a linear regulator.

Canon makes one, I seem to recall it was AC only, produced whine in the audio capture in video mode, and was nearly $100.

Many power delivery bricks are now gan and you can pull a variety of voltages out of them. Incl 12v on some so options are available if you can solder

Yeah we are starting to see them and its awesome. Im seeing some efforts to convert barrel jack connectors of game consoles to have USB PD and then connect that to a simple cell phone adapter. You can then toss those bulky bricks in the trash. But im really referring to redesigned internal PSUs that use GAN for things like old game consoles. But I would take external PSU replacements as well! Oh how I dream of tossing that Xbox 360 PSU in the trash. Like what were they thinking? You can kill someone with that thing!

That's part of it - GAN-FETs are becoming very popular in the audio world (e.g. the Peachtree GaN power amps).

GaN has been getting HUGE in the audio realm, less so in western companies but in Asia in the PA realm its been the go-to for a few years now. Admarks AD442(4x4200w @8ohm) and AD60(2x6000w @ 8ohm) are a great example.

1U, Compact and more power than you can poke a stick at and fairly reliable. Also their pricing dumps on the offerings in the west (Both well under $2000 AUD). Just be warned you want MINIMUM 240v 15A or 32A single phase power circuits for these and probably run them at 1/4 or 1/8th rated output for ultra low THD.

Yeah, it's definitely coming via the Chinese companies, and Korean as well (HiFi Rose), and everywhere from budget to expensive. Class D amps have been making headway against traditional scepticism for a while now, and GaN switching performance is pushing that even harder.

Peachtree seem to be one of the US companies pushing GaN in a big way, including their pure-digital amps.

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