In November 2016, we announced that Cambridge GaN Devices was the joint winner of our annual Postdoc Business Plan Competition, taking home a £20,000 investment. Less than five years later, we again released news about the company. This time, however, the news was the completion of a $9.5 million Series A funding round.
Built on a decade of research in the Electrical Power and Energy Conversion Group in the Department of Engineering, Cambridge GaN Devices, or CGD, was co-founded by Dr Giorgia Longobardi and Professor Florin Udrea. The company was created to develop opportunities arising from the team’s proprietary application of gallium nitride (GaN) to the silicon-based semiconductor transistor manufacturing process.
CGD’s engineers have developed a range of GaN power devices, ICeGaN™, that are much higher performing than state-of-the-art silicon-based devices, enabling significant reductions in the size and weight of power converters, while producing energy efficiencies higher than 99%.
The company’s range of ICeGaN™ transistors is customised for applications in critical markets, such as consumer and industrial Switch Mode Power Supply, lighting, data centres, and electric or hybrid electric vehicles. The higher efficiency of CGD devices, combined with their ease of use, will mean CGD GaN can easily replace silicon in key applications. CGD devices will also enable more compact power systems and better use of energy resources.
The Cambridge GaN case study is featured in our Annual Review 2021. Learn more about some of the exciting projects we have been working on and our financial performance for 2020-21.