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Gallium Nitride
Gallium Nitride, well this may be the future of electronics. It's a super-effective Semiconductor. Some materials, like copper, are very good at conducting electricity, while materials like glass are not. Semiconductors are about halfway between those two extremes, which makes them really versatile for different products. that means gallium nitride or GaN stands to replace the material, that currently rules the electronics industry silicon. Gallium nitride can pave the way for a whole new generation of miniaturized tech. It can make electronics very-very small.
And stuff like better solar cells, more efficient power transmission, there's a lot up for grabs. electric cars, which only use gallium nitride, it'll make them very efficient, so they would have a longer range to drive. Even now some gadgets to use GaN semiconductors for example chargers, it's responsible for managing the power use and energy consumption of the device. You might be familiar with the element gallium. But as the future of silicon, just gallium isn't enough alone it gets interesting when you combine it with nitrogen. I mean, they use some gases, which contain gallium, and some gases which contain nitrogen. And you basically flow them across a hot surface, and these gases react chemically. And then they form very thin layers of this material. there may be 1/100ths of human hair thickness, they are very very small yet very powerful. The major market of GaN is in LEDs and lasers. Blu-ray DVD players actually use GaN lasers to read discs and that super high resolution. And some labs use these lasers to improve microscope, But semiconductor is where gallium nitride will really take off the key is that GaN edges out silicon when it comes to efficiency. You lose maybe only 1% of the energy you're basically trying to convert, whereas if you take a silicon device, you lose 3%. That doesn't sound like a lot, but if you consider just how much silicon we use in everything, it adds up. If you look at gallium nitride it's slightly more expensive than silicon, not dramatically more expensive. But if you build the whole system using gallium nitride it's actually much much cheaper than using silicon and gives better performance. There's the sustainability angle, too. Using less power means saving power. One estimate says that if we replaced all of our silicon electronics with gallium nitride today, we'd save 10%of electricity consumption in the US. We know it works, and it works really well. but the problem is systemic. Silicon is cheap, it's ubiquitous,we're used to it, and the entire electronics industry is built on it.
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