Google investing in Transphorm

Late this month Google invested $20 million in a Southern California start-up called Transphorm leading to a total investment of $38 million in the start-up. Transphorm’s technology increases energy efficiency by cutting down by 90% the power lost when energy is converted from AC to DC and vice versa. This is important since nearly every appliance has to convert power from AC to DC. This technology should help make the batteries for electric cars more efficient and also smaller and cheaper. The technology can also be applied to other uses such as data centers, solar cells, and mobile devices such as cell phones, tablets, and laptops. It could be very useful for electric vehicles since it could help increase the range, an important step towards making electric cars more practical. A main component of the technology is the use of gallium nitride instead of silicon. The chips depend on processes and a module that is unique to the company. They will be producing the chips in their own factory that they are building in Santa Barbara. Transphorm will likely first market to servers, then possibly notebook makers and at a later date electric motors and PV inverters and lastly auto makers. Transphorm’s chips should start appearing in products toward the end of this year. A side benefit of the technology will be a reduction in air conditioning. Data centers require a lot of air conditioning due to the waste heat generated by servers. With less waste heat there will be less need for air conditioning. Because of the high energy use of air conditioning there will be a very large reduction in energy required by data centers.