IN Brief:
- NextGO Epi has raised €2m to expand gallium-oxide epiwafer development and production.
- Its MOCVD-grown material is supplied on substrates measuring up to four inches.
- Thermal behaviour, device reliability, packaging, and process yield remain central barriers to wider adoption.
NextGO Epi has raised €2m in pre-seed funding to expand development and commercial production of gallium-oxide epitaxial wafers for high-voltage power semiconductors.
Vireo Ventures led the round, joined by Ultratech Capital Partners, IBB Ventures, and angel investor Boris Habets. The Berlin company will use the capital for product development, recruitment, production activity, and commercial expansion in Europe and other markets.
Spun out of the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth, NextGO Epi is developing gallium-oxide epiwafers with diameters up to four inches. Founders Ta-Shun Chou, Andreas Popp, and Andreas Fiedler have worked on the material through more than a decade of research, while former Aixtron chief operating officer Jochen Linck has joined as an operating partner.
The company grows electrically active epitaxial layers on gallium-oxide substrates using metal-organic chemical vapour deposition. Layer thickness, doping concentration, crystal defects, surface morphology, and wafer-to-wafer consistency must all remain within controlled limits before the material can support repeatable power-device manufacturing.
Gallium oxide has an ultra-wide bandgap of approximately 4.5eV to 4.8eV and a high theoretical breakdown field. Those properties could enable high-voltage switches with smaller active areas and lower conduction losses than conventional silicon devices under selected operating conditions.
Applications under consideration include renewable-energy inverters, industrial converters, grid equipment, charging infrastructure, pulsed-power systems, and data-centre power supplies. These markets already use silicon carbide and gallium nitride, both of which have moved beyond material research into established device families, package formats, gate-driver ecosystems, and customer qualification programmes.
Thermal behaviour remains gallium oxide’s most prominent engineering constraint. The material conducts heat poorly compared with silicon carbide, making it more difficult to move losses away from the active region of a high-power device.
A strong breakdown field cannot compensate indefinitely for heat trapped inside the die, package, or substrate. Device geometry, switching conditions, attachment materials, thermal interfaces, cooling hardware, and protection strategy must therefore be developed around the material rather than treated as secondary packaging choices.
Long-term electrical reliability presents a second challenge, since threshold stability, interface quality, contact resistance, dynamic behaviour, short-circuit response, and defect propagation must be characterised across realistic voltages and temperatures. Laboratory demonstrations provide useful material data, but industrial adoption requires repeatable behaviour over millions of switching cycles.
Packaging also determines how much of the material’s theoretical performance survives inside a converter. Parasitic inductance can increase voltage overshoot, insulation design must contain higher electric fields, and thermal resistance can erase efficiency gains if the heat path is poorly controlled.
Recent work on 1,200V gallium-nitride modules illustrates how wide-bandgap development moves quickly from the semiconductor layer into packaging, layout, gate control, and thermal management. Silicon carbide followed the same route as larger wafers, improving yields, qualified automotive modules, and mature drivers supported wider deployment.
Gallium oxide may first gain commercial ground in applications combining very high voltage with modest average current, or in pulsed systems where its electrical properties can be exploited without imposing continuous thermal stress. Uniform displacement of SiC or GaN is less likely because switching frequency, voltage, current, cooling, reliability, availability, and cost vary widely between power-conversion applications.
A European epiwafer supplier could give universities, device start-ups, and semiconductor manufacturers earlier access to controlled material. Such access can accelerate transistor development and process qualification, although commercial supply also requires traceable lots, stable specifications, dependable delivery, and a credible capacity roadmap.
Power-semiconductor progress increasingly depends on the equipment surrounding the die, as packages, drivers, magnetics, protection, cooling, and control become more tightly coupled. A material advantage must survive each of those layers before it produces a smaller, cooler, or more efficient converter.
NextGO Epi’s next stage will centre on reproducible wafers rather than isolated peak performance. The company must increase customer qualification activity, control defects and doping across larger areas, and demonstrate that its material can move through device fabrication without unacceptable yield loss.
The €2m round provides capital for that industrialisation work, but gallium oxide remains an emerging semiconductor platform. Its progress will be measured through qualified devices, reliability data, package development, and sustained production yield as much as through the electrical properties of the underlying crystal.
