Gallium "Broke Into" Hundreds Of Millions Of Consumer Market, Revealing The Help Behind Millet

Over the past week, gallium nitride (GaN) has been on fire.

Last Thursday (February 13th), the annual flagship mobile millet 10 was released, and a series of Type-C 65W gallium charger priced at 149 yuan came out.

Lei Jun, chairman and CEO Lei Jun of the Xiaomi group, said at the conference that gallium nitride is a new type of semiconductor material. The charger made is small in size and highly efficient in charging. Like the millet gallium nitride 65W charger, it is half the size of the standard 65W charger, and it takes only 45 minutes to fill the Mi 10 PRO battery.

In this way, gallium first "broke into" many consumers' vision, and led A shares related stocks continued to rise for several days.

Cha Ying Jie is the general manager of Naxi semiconductor China, and Naxi is a gallium nitride chip and technical solution provider for millet gallium nitride charger. In February 17th, Cha Ying Jie said in an exclusive interview with the twenty-first Century economic report reporter that gallium nitride is not a novelty. It has been pushed abroad for more than ten years, and has been studied in China for many years, but most of them are in the sophisticated fields such as military industry.

In fact, millet is not the first mobile phone manufacturer to eat crab. In November last year, the RenoAce mobile phone launched by OPPO carried a gallium nitride charger. On this year's CES, more than 60 gallium nitride products were launched.

But none of these products has the same strong market reaction as millet gallium nitride charger. Cha Yingjie told the twenty-first Century business news reporter that millet was the first mobile phone manufacturer to sell the gallium nitride charger separately. Compared to other fast charging products, the price of millet 149 yuan also hit a new low in the industry. In its view, "the entry of millet will greatly promote the popularity of Gan".

In the past, millet has been playing the role of "price butcher" in the market, this time is no exception. - Gan Jun photo

"Mysterious" gallium nitride

Gallium nitride is a semiconductor material composed of nitrogen and gallium. Because of its forbidden band width (an important characteristic parameter of semiconductor, the voltage and maximum working temperature of the device is determined to be greater than 2.2eV, it is also known as wide band gap semiconductor material.

Silicon carbide, which is much more familiar with the outside world, is also a wide band gap semiconductor. Therefore, Gan and SiC have many similarities in their properties, such as high electron mobility and high temperature resistance.

If further comparison, gallium nitride's high-frequency characteristics will be better than that of silicon carbide, and the cost of silicon based gallium nitride is lower. The application scenarios are mainly below 10kW and 900v.

In a research report, the profit Fund pointed out that there are three main applications of Gan at present: one is the field of optoelectronics, such as LED and VCSEL sensors; the two is the power field, including fast charge heads, frequency converters, new energy vehicles, consumer electronics and other electronic power devices; three is the field of radio frequency, including 5G base stations, military radar, LEO satellites, aerospace and other fields.

Founded in 2014, its headquarters is set up in Losangeles, USA. Its founding team is mainly from IR (International Rectifier) and Fairchild Semiconductor. So, although nmicro is a start-up company, its technological background of the founding team can not be underestimated. For example, Dan Kinzer, the founder of nmicroco, has been the chief technical officer of Fairchild Semiconductor, and is the first inventor of the first generation of silicon power MOS and the third generation of Gan power chips, and has accumulated over 100 patents.

Cha Yingjie told the twenty-first Century business reporter that in the course of development, NNB realized that gallium nitride as a new generation of semiconductor materials will bring about iterative innovation, which can not only rely on a certain enterprise, but needs the whole ecosystem to promote together.

"The stability of Gan materials technology, the maturity of relevant controllers, transformers and other peripheral circuits all have an impact on the application of GaN." Cha Yingjie said. Therefore, in 2016, nmicro decided to choose the adapter as the main field of attack, and began to layout the "tightly coupled high-frequency power ecosystem". For example, in the most complex controller and high frequency magnetic core, nmicro has cooperated with TI, A Morimi and Hitachi respectively.

The three quarter of 2018 is the harvest season. Thanks to the relevant technologies of TI and Hitachi, and the maturity of TSMC, NAC began to mass production for its first customer. According to Chai Ying Jie, the first mass production product of nmicro is the combination of 42W adapter and rechargeable treasure. It is a cooperation with Anke innovation, which was launched on the apple store in the first quarter of 2019.

Subsequently, the whole gallium nitride market began to be opened gradually, and the cooperation case of nmicro was also increasing. Up to now, nmicroco has released more than 20 gallium nitride products.

Millet investment layout

Millet is a special example in many partners, because the two sides, in addition to the cooperation of products, Xiaomi is an investor.

Cha Yingjie told the twenty-first Century business news reporter that the first contact between millet and millet was in the first half of 2018. At that time, he took Nanwei CEO to visit millet co-founder Lin Bin, mainly want to talk about the product end cooperation.

After the meeting, on the same night, Xiaomi began to communicate with him about investing in Nanwei. In the last three weeks, he completed his investment in NASH. For this investment, nmicro's view is that millet is a very influential manufacturer. Its investment value is not only money, but acceleration in technology and products, which is very important for nmicro.

Later, after more than a year's cooperative research and development by Nanwei and purple rice and cool team, millet gallium nitride charger finally came out. Cha Yingjie told reporters that the impact of cooperation with millet has begun to appear, and in the past week, nmicrohas received more customers' development needs.

For the future development of Gan, Cha Ying Jie said that the current cost of gallium nitride is relatively high compared to that of silicon. But it predicts that in two to three years, the cost of Gan devices can be close to that of conventional silicon.

It is reported that about 15 of the 20 surplus products released by nmicro has been in the US market, and the selling price is basically over 50 dollars. And Millet's entry is accelerating the price reduction of Gan products.

In the past, millet has been playing the role of "price butcher" in the market, this time is no exception. This may have an impact on other potential partners, but it also speeds up the popularity of gallium nitride products.

Cha Yingjie said that with the increase of production and the gradual maturity and maturity of high frequency ecology, the market scale of gallium nitride will expand rapidly. In the market below 900V, gallium nitride has great potential for application, which occupies about 68% of the total power market. According to the overall market value of US $15 billion 400 million, the potential market of Gan in power devices is more than US $10 billion.

According to Yole, a market research firm, in 2024, the market for gallium nitride could reach US $358 million in the field of mobile phone and notebook charging. Under optimistic circumstances, the power market of gallium nitride will exceed US $750 million.

The latest research report of CITIC Securities believes that GaN material has the advantages of high power, high frequency and high thermal conductivity. The charging chip achieves high output power while maintaining the volume of the charger. It is expected that with the increasing demand for portability, the global GaN fast charging market in 2025 will be expected to reach about 60000000000 yuan, while speeding up the replacement of GaN chips in other emerging fields for Si based products.

?