Avnet Silica and Navitas Semiconductor an industry leader in gallium nitride (GaN) power ICs and silicon carbide power devices, announced close cooperation between the two companies to grow the market for Navitas’ advanced performance and highly power efficient GaNFast™ power ICs with GaNSense technology.

The two companies will work closely together to deliver their combined complementary knowhow to bring a high level of support and expertise to customers across the EMEA region.

GaN is a next-generation semiconductor technology that is growing in importance because of its ability to offer significantly improved performance over conventional silicon semiconductors, while also reducing the energy and physical space needed to deliver that performance. It runs up to 20 times faster than silicon and can also enable up to three times more power handling or three times faster charging capability, as well as its size advantages, leading to potentially 20% lower system cost.

Navitas’ leading-edge GaNFast™ power ICs with GaNSense™ technology integrate power, drive, and control capability, as well as autonomous protection and loss-less current sensing, to deliver the industry’s highest energy efficiency, smallest footprints, and the fastest power-conversion performance. The company’s latest family of GaNSense half-bridge ICs offers a revolutionary, fully integrated, single component solution that enables AC-DC power supplies to achieve MHz switching frequencies in a broad range of soft-switching applications.

“We chose to work with Avnet Silica as one of the premier experts in semiconductor distribution in Europe,” said David Carroll, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Navitas. “The combination of our highly differentiated solutions together with Avnet Silica’s expertise in technology markets will further support designers and engineers to meet ever more stringent efficiency and size requirements and regulations. With our highly experienced technical team and our European applications lab, together, we can support customers with the best possible solutions and fastest time-to-market.”

“Navitas’ unique GaN technology and its world-renowned monolithically integrated gate driver and feature set will significantly expand our ‘SILICA’ wide-band-gap semiconductor portfolio,” said Gilles Beltran, President Avnet Silica. “Navitas has a depth of expertise in power semiconductors that is unrivalled across the industry for this kind of advanced technology. We envisage this cooperation will bring huge benefits for customers operating at the cutting edge of power system architectures in a wide selection of applications.”