Chip firm Navitas, worth $1 billion, is competing with industry leaders to replace silicon chips with more environmentally-friendly gallium-nitride ones.

Many electronic devices are powered by Silicon chips. More eco-friendly chips are on the way.

Gallium nitride is a compound made from aluminum and nitrogen. According to a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University, the GaN chips can generate more power than the silicon ones.

Companies would like to be involved in GaN. The CEO of a $1 billion startup says it wants to disrupt the global Semiconductor industry with its technology. An emerging technology he says has a billion dollar market potential is the reason why he started a new company. He said it's difficult to convince electronics companies to replace Silicon chips because of a lack of awareness and quality control issues.

More than 50 million GaN chips will be produced and shipped by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, according to the California-based company. It raised more than $300 million before going public.

Most of the GaN chips from Navitas can be found in phone and laptop charging devices. Data-server meltdowns that lead to service disruptions and the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars are what the company wants to prevent. Data centers may be able to cut carbon emissions by cooling their infrastructures with GaN chips.

"I believe that we can accelerate the world's transition to more renewable energy," she stated.

It took decades of research and development to come up with a design for the chip. The competitive edge over GaN chips was given by integrated circuits.

The $5 billion GaN chip market could grow to $26 billion by the year 2030. GaN chips are prone to defects and face supply-chain issues.

Navitas approached the challenges by iterating on its product and educating its customers

The compound isn't new and experts say it has the power to change the industry.

The study of GaN began in the 1990s. The blue LEDs were invented in 1993 by Shuji Nakamura, Hiroshi Amano, and Isamu Akasaki, and spurred the commercialization of the compound.

GaN's application was unpopular because it was prone to defects. Designers and engineers tried to make the chips work, but they weren't good enough.

The electric currents might not flow correctly because the GaN chips are made of different materials. The chip will not turn on if the voltage is too low. If the voltage is too high, it will blow a fuses.

GaN is fast and efficient but sensitive to how you turn them on and off.

Electronic companies don't know that the GaN chips can work with their devices, which is a roadblock to the chip's usefulness.

Stephen Oliver, a corporate vice president of marketing and investor relations at Navitas, said that the biggest challenge was not knowing that high-speed components existed. It's not possible to drop a Ferrari engine into a Yugo and expect it to perform. Oliver said he has to educate people about GaN.

There is a lack of awareness about the chips in academics. She said that the course on electronic design at most schools is mostly based on Silicon.

There's still a lot of knowledge gaps in our curriculum. Cornell's engineering department works GaN into its curriculum, which leads to the hiring of her students to build GaN chips.

GaN chips are far from replacing silicon chips

The promise of GaN chips has been overshadowed by the dominance of Silicon chips. Disruptions in the supply chain have limited the availability of manufacturers.

Customers have been driving crazy because of the shortages.

He said that GaN chips need to work with other chips and parts of the device to produce power.

Oliver said that at chip giants like Intel, Silicon is critical for handling low voltages.

The GaN compound is difficult to maintain and can easily break if manufacturers don't deposit it on a wafer. It's more expensive due to the longer manufacturing process.

Nevertheless, Navitas is growing. The acquisition of GeneSic helped boost the company's stock price. The company invested in research and development to design GaN chips for larger systems.

Next year, the company will roll out GaN-based data-center supplies, followed by solar-powered GaN chips the year after that, and finally GaN-powered electric vehicles by 2025. The new US chips law could lead to funding for a manufacturing plant in the US.

He thinks the world will need more manufacturing capacity for GaN chips.