IN Brief:
- Low-voltage power stages are under pressure from AI compute, robotics, and higher-current board-level rails.
- EPC and Renesas are aligning on licensing and second-sourcing to broaden availability of eGaN devices.
- The agreement targets faster productisation, plus improved supply assurance for high-volume customers.
Efficient Power Conversion (EPC) and Renesas Electronics have agreed a licensing and second-sourcing arrangement for low-voltage enhancement-mode gallium nitride (eGaN) power devices, a move aimed at widening access to GaN transistors in applications where switching speed, efficiency, and power density are now board-level constraints.
Under the agreement, Renesas gains access to EPC’s low-voltage eGaN technology and associated supply-chain ecosystem, while also second-sourcing several EPC GaN devices already in mass production. The companies have also set out plans to collaborate over the next year to establish internal wafer fabrication capabilities for the licensed products, tightening control over manufacturing scale-up as volumes increase.
EPC is positioning the deal around the limits of silicon in high-density conversion stages, where losses and thermal headroom increasingly dictate enclosure size and cooling complexity. GaN’s faster switching and reduced parasitics have made it a default consideration for designers pushing beyond the comfortable operating margins of silicon MOSFETs, particularly in compact DC-DC rails, high-frequency converters, and systems where every gram of thermal mass is a penalty.
Alex Lidow, CEO of EPC, said: “Together, EPC and Renesas are forming a global alliance to deliver state-of-the-art power efficiency.” The company’s messaging is explicitly tied to AI infrastructure and autonomous systems, where low-voltage power delivery is becoming a first-order problem, not a downstream detail.
For Renesas, the licensing arrangement complements an existing high-voltage GaN portfolio, which the company has been expanding through acquisitions and product releases. Renesas has pointed to applications including AC-DC power supplies, EV chargers, solar inverters, and industrial motor drives for high-voltage GaN, while the EPC agreement brings low-voltage coverage into the same roadmap, from 48V architectures down into sub-volt rails used by processors and accelerators.
Rohan Samsi, VP, GaN Business Division at Renesas, said: “Expanding our business into low-voltage GaN allows us to serve the fastest-growing power segments.” For electronics engineers, the practical upside is improved sourcing resilience, plus a broader catalogue of GaN options spanning low- and high-voltage designs under a single supplier umbrella.
