Demand Grows For Tiny Phone Chargers Using 'New Silicon' (ft.com) 91
A tiny phone, tablet and laptop charger, the first to use gallium nitride rather than silicon chips, has seen sales four times greater than predicted [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled], prompting the Chinese company behind it to try to ramp up production. From a report: Anker, a Shenzhen-based company that specialises in computer and mobile phone accessories, unveiled a line of chargers using gallium nitride (GaN), which conducts electrons 1,000 times faster than silicon, in January. The use of GaN allowed Anker to virtually halve the size of its charger, while retaining full-speed charging. Another Chinese-owned company, RAVPower, has also started using GaN in its chargers. "Silicon limits have been pushed almost to the extreme," said Steven Yang, co-founder and chief executive of Anker. "But GaN is at [the next] phase."
The introduction of the new semiconductor into the consumer market came after a series of military and other commercial applications, in everything from electric vehicles to radar systems. Raytheon, the US defence group, said in 2017 that it had spent $300m researching GaN since 1999. Like some of its peers, it uses the material in its active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, which are able to detect stealth fighters at long range. "Once the power technology is out of the box it will be widely adopted around the world and that means everyone can produce power-switching modules," said Stephen Bryen, a former deputy undersecretary of defence and senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. "And that is what is used in the radars -- that's the nexus between commercial and military use."
The introduction of the new semiconductor into the consumer market came after a series of military and other commercial applications, in everything from electric vehicles to radar systems. Raytheon, the US defence group, said in 2017 that it had spent $300m researching GaN since 1999. Like some of its peers, it uses the material in its active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars, which are able to detect stealth fighters at long range. "Once the power technology is out of the box it will be widely adopted around the world and that means everyone can produce power-switching modules," said Stephen Bryen, a former deputy undersecretary of defence and senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy. "And that is what is used in the radars -- that's the nexus between commercial and military use."
Wow those really *are* tiny (for the power) (Score:3)
Those look great!.
The headline is one of the worst I have ever seen though, no link to a product to look at, and the only actual link is a HUGE PAYWALL, not "may be paywalled" lol
Re:Wow those really *are* tiny (for the power) (Score:5, Informative)
no link to a product to look at
PowerPort Atom PD 1 [anker.com]
Re:Wow those really *are* tiny (for the power) (Score:5, Informative)
Anker stuff is generally very good. Not the cheapest but well designed, quality parts and reliable.
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It is a little bit smaller than all the QC3.0 charger I have, but not by that much...
What I would like is a QC charger station, I have 4 devices that are QC, I don't want 4 AC plugs taken for this. I am tempted by buying 4 items like this [aliexpress.com], put them in a small enclosure and powered by a old laptop power supply, it would cost me less than $5 + old PS.
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QC3.0 maxes out at 18 watts, while this Anker charger does 30 watts using the USB-PD spec. As such, it can also be used to charge/power laptops that have USB-C power inputs.
If they do not go *boom* (Score:2)
Like Li-ion, then what is the point?
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You mean RA-AWR
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More cheap Chinese crap that can burn my house down. No thanks, I'll stick with something that is actually UL certified.
I can wait a few minutes for the battery to charge. It takes a few weeks at least to rebuild a house, or recover from fire/smoke damage.
Not a popular position to take, but Chinese manufacturing is now the best in the world. Yes, it is partially thanks to huge help over the past several decades from the West, which took all of its manufacturing genius and moved it to China to try to save a few pennies. But don't underestimate the armies of Chinese engineers, and the sheer determination of the system.
China is very good at producing crap as well, but that is not by choice -- that is what the western companies ask them to build. Don't blame C
Better links than supplied by TFE (Score:5, Insightful)
Anker’s new 60W USB-C GaN charger looks like the one we’ve been waiting for [theverge.com]
The next generation of wall chargers is getting smaller and better [theverge.com]
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That's nice, but it still takes up two outlet spots by the looks of it. It's well past time that designers rethink the wall-wart so that we can plug two in next to each other. It's ridiculous that I need a multi-outlet strip to plug two items in.
"conducts electrons 1,000 x faster than silicon" (Score:5, Interesting)
Could someone summarize this for me in a way that isn't scientifically illiterate?
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Not here...
Re:"conducts electrons 1,000 x faster than silicon (Score:5, Funny)
Sure!
Electron travels at about a third the speed of light "c" in common conductors such as metals.
This new super material conducts electrons at about 1000x that speed, so roughly 300c. Since c is the speed limit for pretty much all particles (save tachyons) and c is the barrier for causality, time and light, it means that electrons conducted by GaN travel faster than time itself. Thus your phone would be charged before you plugged it in.
It's just amazing! No wonder 4x more people want to buy these chargers (did they project a single sale?)
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it was originally 4 billion times more people who wanted to buy the chargers (now and in the future) but at 300c the Lorenz contraction brings it down to just 4x
Re:"conducts electrons 1,000 x faster than silicon (Score:4, Informative)
No, the electromotive _force_ moves that fast, but the electrons only move about an inch a minute.
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No, the electromotive _force_ moves that fast, but the electrons only move about an inch a minute.
Is that the only mistake that was in the GP's post?
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My laptop is charging on one of these right now, I read this post before it was written.
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"This new super material conducts electrons at about 1000x that speed, so roughly 300c. Since c is the speed limit for pretty much all particles (save tachyons) and c is the barrier for causality, time and light, it means that electrons conducted by GaN travel faster than time itself. Thus your phone would be charged before you plugged it in."
It's obviously could not have been made without the Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline and so it has a US patent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Big nothing. The claim is that using GaAs, these power adaptors - which are, these days, all switch mode, ie. based on semiconductors rather than electromagnetic coils - can be made smaller. Linked article is fully and knowingly paywalled. What products others lined seem to raise a lot of questions:
1. OK nice that theverge shows the things next to a 5W charger, but no idea how eg. the 45W adaptor compares to a MBP brick. It looks like maybe the same size, except flatter, oh and it covers the socket surround
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Btw. I don't understand these self-professed tech writers who have "decades of experience" etc. - they don't even do the obvious thing when the claim is that these things are smaller: no side by side photo anywhere. No money to plunge for one, despite journalists traveling a lot and benefitting from small bricks? Or even these early adapter adopter folks don't trust these? Again the 60W Anchor, on the photo at least, looks as large as the standard adapter.
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The 30W Anker charger (the Atom PD1) is roughly the same size as the 5W iPhone charger. That's quite impressive.
I agree that the 60W charger seems extremely large in comparison to the 30W charger. I don't understand why, you've got 2x the power and ports, and yet it's like 10x the physical volume.
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Re:"conducts electrons 1,000 x faster than silicon (Score:5, Informative)
I think they mean that using gallium they can create transistors and diodes with 1000x lower resistance, and therefore lower waste heat.
1000x is a bit of an exaggeration, but the tech does work. These are basically little switching power supplies, which as the name suggests uses a silicon switch in the form of a MOSFET. The switch gets warm because it's not a perfect conductor of electricity, some of that energy gets turned into heat. Making it more efficient means you can have a smaller power supply due to less need to dissipate heat.
Re: "conducts electrons 1,000 x faster than silico (Score:2, Informative)
To add to that, the real savings in size comes from the smaller inductors and capacitors that can be used due to higher switching speeds. The higher switching speeds are possible because of the lower resistance and lower heat dissipation, partly, but also because the larger band-gap and of the GaN devices and the higher electron mobility just plain allows them to switch faster, in absolute terms, on-and-off. Also, it fewer stages are needed because higher voltage can be switched per chip. Less stages means
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Does this not have more applications in Graphics cards and CPUs than chargers?
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Maybe... I think the issue may be the cost. One for a single charger isn't too bad, but if you look at the power regulation for a high end CPU or GPU there are a lot of FETs in there. Silicon ones are really cheap but maybe for really high end stuff or heat constrained stuff like servers it makes sense.
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They are faster but not in the actual speed of electricity but the speed at which they can switch on and off efficiently. A Transistor (GaN or any type) when it is on has very little power loss, when it is off has no or little power loss but when it is switching (transitioning from on to off or off to on) has power loss. The faster this can transition the lower power loss (this is called switching losses.) Does this mean less heat, yes all else being equ
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So "conducts electrons 1000x faster" really means there is much lower intrinsic capacitance (which is the source of the "switching loss").
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Transistors with lower 'on' resistance made with gallium instead of silicon mean less heat dissipated in the charger, so it can be smaller.
Also the charger is a proper USB-C PD charge so it can negotiate higher voltage with the device and so send more power at lower current, reducing the losses in the cable.
So a combination of new semiconductor tech and proper product design.
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Essentially electrons in crystalline materials (which GaN and Si are) behave "quantumly". This can lead to weird effects such as an electron appearing to be heavier or lighter than you would expect depending on the material. Another property is the speed at which the average electron appears to be moving (drift velocity) when a given electric field (E) is applied. Mobility is simply dv/dE which ideally is linear (isn't the case at high E). The crystallinity of a material is important to this value. Gra
I don't get it (Score:1)
the bulgy part of a PSU is the transformer, who cares about the silicon? did they put a PSU in silicon?
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the bulgy part of a PSU is the transformer, who cares about the silicon? did they put a PSU in silicon?
The higher electron mobility of GaN means you can switch faster without dissipating too much heat so you can have smaller magnetics. They're also good to 400 degrees so you can run them small and hot.
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Obviously, you don't live in the UK. For a couple of decades, the largest part of any transformer has been the 3-pronged mains plug.
This is an interesting history behind the UK plugs. They were originally made in 1940 to be used as obstacles to prevent the Nazis from landing on the beaches of Dover and advancing inland. They were designed to inflict maximum debilitating pain to the foot of any German soldier stepping on one. But the invasion never came, so after the war they were repurposed as electrical plugs.
I'm calling bullshit on this (Score:3)
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Sure I could see this kind of tech replacing a TO220 and heatsink with SO8 package and taking 10% to 20% volume out of PSU but that does not justify a "Tiny Phone Chargers" headline. I guess "Reduced S
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Sure I could see this kind of tech replacing a TO220 and heatsink with SO8 package and taking 10% to 20% volume out of PSU but that does not justify a "Tiny Phone Chargers" headline. I guess "Reduced Size Phone Chargers" does not get as many clicks, hence my old man grumbling, I don't like marketing hype. BTW the best way to get a tiny charger today is to put them a metal case so you can jam everything together and still get the heat out. Also helps with EMC, but plastic is cheaper so bigger it is.
The main
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The limit on size will be the separation needed on the AC side, which itself depends on the AC voltage. In 100-120V countries you can get away with less separation. Most of these chargers are universal voltage though.
The AC needs to be separated from itself (live and neutral) and from the low voltage side. It's also a good idea to make the prongs that go into the AC socket pretty robust, and legally the charger has to surround them by a certain amount (i.e. they can't be on the edges where they could get po
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Yes, the things limiting the size are typically a transformer and a heatsink. You can have smaller transformers if you increase the switching frequency, but that tends to decease efficiency (and need bigger heatsinks) unless you use higher spec ferrites and have faster rise and fall times. GaN could help with the lower rise and fall times though I was under the impression that the speed of silicon mosfets wasn't really the limiting factor (more likely the ferrite). It would be interesting to know what frequ
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If you have fast enough transistors, you can generate switching frequencies that need less magnetic core material. Go fast enough, and you don't even need any core material at all, using an air core transformer.
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Huawei, China again - US spy thriller? (Score:2)
https://www.justice4shanetodd.... [justice4shanetodd.com]
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who cares? (Score:2)
Why target the PSU? (Score:2)
I don't care much for a smaller, cooler or faster-switching PSU. But if these transistors are 1000x faster, can they be used in CPU:s or other chips to make them faster?
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Both Si and GaN can achieve comparable switching speeds. Both have comparable high-electric field saturated velocity and comparable low-electric field mobility. The most significant difference between them is their energy bandgaps. Higher bandgap means GaN can sustain an electric field that is dramatically higher than Si before avalanche breakdown occurs. This means that GaN and Si devices with identical architectures (as identical as practically possible) will find the GaN avalanche breakdown voltage t
makes sense (Score:1)
we've been using GaN devices for years for Ka radios, sometimes with devices so fresh from the factory that the part number produces zero google hits!