Navitas Semiconductor at Baird Conference: Powering AI Data Centers

On Tuesday, 03 June 2025, Navitas Semiconductor (NASDAQ:NVTS) presented at the Baird Global Consumer, Technology & Services Conference 2025. The company highlighted its strategic shift towards high-voltage power solutions for AI data centers, while addressing both growth prospects and market challenges. CEO Gene Sheridan emphasized Navitas’s unique position with gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) technologies, aiming for significant revenue growth in the coming years.

Key Takeaways

• Navitas is the only company offering both GaN and SiC technologies without legacy silicon systems.
• The company is set to benefit from NVIDIA’s 800V architecture for next-gen data centers.
• Navitas expects substantial revenue impact from data centers by 2026-2027.
• The focus is shifting from mobile chargers to data centers, EVs, and solar inverters.
• Over 200 patents protect Navitas’s integrated GaN IC technology, ensuring competitive advantage.

Financial Results

• GaN experienced 50% growth last year, with expectations for accelerated growth by year-end.
• SiC market faced a slowdown due to inventory corrections.
• Navitas launched its first GaN chips in 2018, achieving rapid adoption in mobile chargers.

Operational Updates

• Navitas achieved 40 design wins last year, totaling 70 customer projects.
• The company launched GaN chips for the data center market late last year and is ramping up production.
• Collaboration with NVIDIA focuses on 800V architecture for advanced data centers.
• Sampling of low-voltage GaN for 48V DC-to-DC converters is underway, with shipments expected next year.

Future Outlook

• Significant revenue impact from data centers is anticipated starting in late 2026, ramping into 2027 and 2028.
• GaN is expanding into new markets, including solar and EVs, in the coming quarters.
• AI’s expansion from cloud to edge devices is expected to drive demand for Navitas’s power solutions.
• Exploration of power module expansion is underway, leveraging GaN, silicon controllers, and high-frequency magnetics.
• The company plans to release the fifth generation of GaN safe technologies.

Q&A Highlights

• Navitas’s GaN IC technology is a key competitive advantage, protected by over 200 patents.
• A cross-licensing agreement with Infineon offers dual-sourcing options for customers.
• The SiC business focuses on ultra-high voltage and reliability for grid connectivity.
• Potential collaboration opportunities are seen with MPS, which lacks GaN/SiC capabilities but makes modules.
• GaN will reach voltage limits, while SiC will continue to perform better at high voltages.

In conclusion, Navitas Semiconductor is strategically positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for energy-efficient power solutions in AI, data centers, and beyond. Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Baird Global Consumer, Technology & Services Conference 2025:

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Okay. Well, let’s let’s get started. Good morning. Welcome to Baird’s twenty twenty five Global Consumer Technology and Service Conference. I’m Tristan Gerass, senior semiconductor analyst at Baird.

I would like to introduce Navitas, a leading supplier of next generation power solutions. We’re honored to have with us today Gene Sheridan, Co Founder and Chief Executive Officer. And with that, let’s get started. I think, Gene, you have a few slides for us.

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Sounds great. Yes. Thanks, Tristan. Glad to be here. And glad to give you guys an introduction to Navitas.

If we can kick off the slides, or do I give a little Sounds good. A green button. Okay, great. So Navitas, I started Navitas with my cofounders eleven years ago. I’ve spent the whole my whole industry in semiconductors and primarily in power semiconductors.

And for thirty years, we developed power semiconductors using silicon. But in the last two decades, two new materials have arrived that show not only great promise, but significant commercial traction to replace silicon in power semiconductors. And power semiconductors are really the chips that handle power, volts and amps. All forms of electronics need power supplies to power those electronics and they need power chips, semiconductors to operate those power supplies. Gallium nitride and silicon carbide, while totally different materials, have very similar properties that are dramatically better than silicon.

The name of the game in power supplies is mainly energy efficiency, how efficiently can we move that power from one form or place to another form or place, and usually power density, which is how much power can we pack in a small size, lightweight, and ideally low cost. Power density is usually driven by switching speed. Most of these power applications are switching power supplies. The faster you switch them, the more power you can deliver in smaller size, lighter weight, and ultimately lower cost. Gallium nitride, combining these two different materials together, gallium and nitrogen, or GaN, and silicon carbide, combining silicon and carbon to create silicon carbide, both possess a strong ability to handle high voltage and high current with small tiny chips that are super efficient and very fast switching.

So I’ll keep coming back to those same two themes, fast and efficient. Silicon carbide actually took off first. It’s already a 3,000,000,000 to 4 billion dollars market. Gallium nitrate is kind of a new kid on the block, just really got commercialized in the last decade and commercialized by Navitas. We were the first company to come along and drive commercial adoption in one mainstream market, which was mobile chargers.

We’ll talk more about that later. And now we’re moving into data centers, electric vehicles and solar inverters. We acquired a silicon carbide company a few years ago. So now we’re actually the only company on the planet that has gallium nitride, silicon carbide, without the distraction or dilution of silicon based power systems like a lot of my competitors are selling today. So big spotlight today, everybody’s talking about AI.

It’s a big deal, not just for AI, but for the power electronics world. You’ve probably heard about it. Not only is it massive processing power, these are massive chips requiring massive power electronics, power semiconductors. Silicon is quickly running out of steam to deliver the power and energy efficiency that AI processors need. This is a perfect fit for silicon carbide and gallium nitride.

So kind of perfect time, perfect place to really solve a big power problem. When NVIDIA showed up with Hopper, Blackwell and Rubin, the series of three, we’re literally going from CPUs of the past, which would be 300 watts, would be a lot of power for the processor. Blackwell is already a 1,000 watts. Rubin is going to be 2,000 to 3,000 watts. These are crazy, crazy numbers to deliver to a little tiny chip on top of the memory chips and then you put dozens of those processors inside the server rack.

You’re going from a a server rack is like the building block of a data center. It used to be 10,000 or 20,000 watts for the entire server rack, which is like 50 shelves and lots of processors. That would be a crazy amount of power. Today, we’re already designing 100 kilowatt server racks to put in all those processors, and now we’re trying to go to a half a megawatt or even a megawatt processor. Crazy, crazy numbers we never imagined a few years ago, but that’s a crazy good challenge for my company to technically use silicon carbide and gallium nitrate to solve that problem.

We had 40 we just launched our GaN chips for this market late last year. So we started ramping. We’re in early revenue days. The numbers are not big yet, but a lot of this is brewing for ’26 and 2027. We’ll talk more about that.

I sell my chips to the power supply companies. The power supply companies then resell them to the big data center companies, the names that I show up here. We had 40 design wins last year, which is a really good start, 70 total customer projects that we’re trying to ramp. And just last week, we were announced in an NVIDIA announcement about the collaborations that they’ve created in a next generation data center that takes that server rack to the megawatt level and beyond for really late twenty twenty six and 2027 and beyond. It’s the fastest growing part of my pipeline, even though we’re doing really well in other segments, which we’ll talk about.

So a little bit more of a deep dive here because it’s such late breaking news and it’s so exciting for our company. Traditional data centers shown at the top, those were powered with silicon. We call them 12 volt data centers because that was the primary bus voltage inside the data center, relatively low voltage to transfer the power around to those processors. There’s if there’s one technical thing you want to know about power electronics, it’s Ohm’s law, power is equal to current times voltage. If you want to deliver a lot of power, you want to deliver it with the lowest amount of current possible because when you try to bus high current around through cabling and over PCBs, you get a lot of power distribution losses.

So it’s very inefficient to deliver a lot of power with a relatively low voltage because voltage times current equals power. If you want a big power and you’ve got a little voltage, you’ve got to distribute a lot of current. That’s not good. 12 volts was fine as a low voltage when we were only doing a few hundred watts per processor or maybe 10 kilowatts in the server rack as I show there, but all of sudden here comes AI, and now it’s going to a thousand watts per processor and it’s going to 100 kilowatts per server rack. So we had already been working 48 volt data centers.

We all quickly moved to 48 volt. That’s a four times higher voltage. What’s cool about that, which means the current can be four times less for the same amount of power, And guess what? The distribution losses are proportional to the square of current. That’s the second technical thing to note today.

So instead of being four times less current, it’s 16 times less power distribution losses by going from 12 volts to 48 volts. So that’s a great step. We didn’t invent this. We’re following the trend. We’re supporting the trend.

It just means you need higher voltage power chips, which plays into the strength of gallium nitride and silicon carbide because they’re really good as you go up in voltage. Well now, last week, NVIDIA announced the future of data centers is 800 volts. So imagine 48 volts going up almost 20x or 15x, that’s 15x squared in terms of reducing the power distribution losses or making a lot of power get delivered much more energy efficiently. But it also means more high voltage power chips, more gallium nitride, more silicon carbide. And what I love about this too is they’re even hooking up farther into the grid.

The grid’s AC power starts at super high voltages and we have to step it all the way down to when you plug in the wall here, grid power when you plug in here is 110 or two twenty volt depending upon Europe or US. We need take that AC all the way down, but if you want to do an 800 volt data center, why would you take it all the way down to 110, two 20, just to then boost it back up to 800 to power your data center, that would be very inefficient. So instead, NVIDIA and everybody else is going to hook up into the data into the grid, start to get 13.8 kilovolts, step that down to 800 volts, take that right into the data center, we get a really efficient, super powerful megawatt data center. And guess what? You need super high voltage silicon carbide chips to connect to that very high voltage inside the grid, something that silicon carbide is good at, and in particular Navitas’s silicon carbide is the best at three kilovolt, five kilovolt, six kilovolt.

So we love that this means a lot of power chips, it means a lot of gallium nitride and silicon carbide and it plays into Navitas’ unique strength that our silicon carbide is very good at these super high voltages. All of this is rolling out over the next two years, a lot of work to do, a lot of R and D going on. It’s not just Navitas, there’s a whole ecosystem working on this move to data centers. And then just a quick financial snapshot. We launched the first GaN chips in 2018.

As I mentioned, that was the first mainstream adoption of GaN chips. We started with mobile chargers. So I’m talking a lot about data centers today as the next big thing, but mobile chargers was our first big thing. Our GaN chips are literally used in the top 10 or even top 20 out of top 20 mobile players in the world. We started with aftermarket guys like Anker, Belkin, and as Amazon then quickly moved to every mobile player, Apple, Samsung, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Xiaomi, Vivo, you name it, they’re using our GaN chips and mobile chargers.

We’re not the only one, but we’re leader in that space. That revenue ramped really quickly. We saw a slowdown in the last two years. Last year and this year, the silicon carbide market slowed down because of inventory corrections and a slowdown in solar, industrial and EV. So we felt that slowdown last year.

We’re feeling it this year even though gallium nitride last year was at an all time high with those mobile chargers still ramping, 50% growth last year. We see our growth really kicking into high gear at the end of this year and ramping into next year. As mobile grows, gallium nitride is going to solar for the first time, gallium nitride is going to EV for the first time in the next few quarters, and most importantly, ramping that data center gallium nitride and silicon carbide for data centers, especially with the 800 volt data centers coming late twenty sixteen into 2017. So that is a super fast overview and tutorial on power electronics, power semiconductors, gallium nitride and silicon carbide.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Great. Well, thanks for the introduction. Maybe just a first high level question, Jean. When you started the company years ago, what did you see that, I guess, some of the traditional analog companies didn’t see because they are just starting to do a little bit of what you guys have done for several years and obviously they’re really behind. What did you see and what technologies did you think you have that ultimately gave you that market advantage?

And I think a few years ago, you talked about having about a two year leeway relative to competitors in gallium nitride. And when you started in silicon carbide, we’re getting industry feedback. You had the best solution. So what did you see at the beginning? And maybe just a quick retrospective on what you’ve achieved so far as far as your early vision for the company.

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Yes. Our founders, we actually have worked together in power semiconductors for much of the last three decades in our career, starting with International Rectifier, who is really a lead inventor of silicon based power transistors. So when I talk about power semiconductors, we’re often talking about the power transistor, the thing that can turn on and off, those volts and amps and deliver a lot of power. Gallium nitride, we started the first gallium nitride program at International Rectifier over twenty years ago, but we knew it was very early days. This is new material.

You got to work on manufacturing, reliability, cost structure, of course, getting the performance better. It takes a long time. When we started in Avitas, we felt like the time was right for the remaining challenges of gallium nitride commercialization to be solved and really start ramping that technology. That was eleven years ago. The biggest remaining challenge was that GaN is very fast transistor, but super hard to drive it and control it.

It’s like having a Ferrari engine, but not having the suspension and braking system around it to handle and harness that incredible power and speed. So we knew when we started, we had to solve that problem. Many people were trying to do custom silicon drivers outside the GaN chip to try to harness and control and drive that really fast transistor. We, in a nutshell, figured out how to integrate the drivers and control circuitry directly into GaN, which even to this day is a mystery to most of our competitors, very hard to do, ultimately led to over 200 patents being filed or issued in how to integrate drive into that GaN chip. Once we solved that remaining problem, the rest of GaN was pretty well solved, reliability, manufacturability, yield.

I mean, there was work to be done, but that really created generation one of mainstream adoption of GaN. And we targeted on mobile chargers quite simply because it was a simple value prop. We pack a lot of power in a small size in a market that everybody can relate to. Who doesn’t want a fast charger that slides in your pocket to charge your laptop, your tablet, and your phone, super lightweight, lots of power, multiple outputs if you want it, and it adopts fast, and it wasn’t looking for a decade of field reliability that you would need for some of these more conservative industries. So we targeted on mobile chargers, and the rest is sort of history.

You can see it ramped up really fast, and now we’re moving to that next wave of growth as gallium nitrate goes into all new markets like data center, solar and EV.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Well, great progress so far, good to hear that you’ve had this thirty year experience in the field at a time when companies are trying to figure this out. Going back to the NVIDIA announcement, can you give us and I know that it’s an engagement at this point. It’s not exclusive. How should we look at this in terms of timing, in terms of potential content? And of course, we’re getting questions about potentially what does this mean at the revenue level.

So there might be ways to maybe tie this to content per kilowatt and timing, potential market share, anything that you can give us that helps quantify that opportunity

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: as

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: And

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: then first to clarify, we have very good opportunities here in this middle section. This is happening today, 48 volts. But we really have high voltage gallium nitrate, six fifty volt gallium nitrate and silicon carbide fits right here in this box. We just started sampling earlier this year the low voltage GaN, so we’re just opening the doors to go into this second power conversion stage. It’s a 48 volt DC to DC converter.

So this is already going to happen. We’re starting to ship these this year. This will grow next year. This is sampling this year and start shipping next year. So this is great, and this was already a great opportunity.

When you go down here, it’s just the opportunity explodes further into using our super high voltage, we call UHV, ultra high voltage silicon carbide, when we connect up to that grid at that really high voltage. That’s brand new. And I’d say first commercial ramp would be a little bit late twenty twenty six, but mostly And between now and then, we’ve got a lot of development work to improve the products and hit the specs and deliver the samples and do the system development work with a lot of the partners. At the same time, the high voltage will continue here.

And as I said, we’re expanding with the 100 volt, which will go and start ramping in 2026 and 2027. So it’s really an expansion going from 48 volt shipping this year, 48 volt shipping next year, I mean, in this rung, and then expanding rapidly late ’twenty six and mostly into ’twenty seven and ’twenty eight, where the full 800 volt data center rollout will

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: happen. Great. So typically, what we’ve seen is NVIDIA innovates and there is new solutions being implemented. But then ultimately, it expand into other AI platform and then eventually in traditional data center platforms. So it really drastically expand the unit opportunity.

Do you see a potential for that? Do you see an interest from hyperscalers or people talking to the industry? I mean, you’ve talked about a number of engagements and the number of those engagement has increased as of last quarter. Maybe if you could give us a recap of your other engagement, what it is for, what’s been the progression and the opportunity that you see comparing those engagement with what you’re doing with NVIDIA today.

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Within the data center world or

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Within data center.

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Yes. That’s a good point because everybody talks about NVIDIA, but data center and AI is not just about NVIDIA. And the move to 800 volt data center has been talked about in early work in academia and other places for quite some time. So it’s not that also is not unique. I think all the hyperscalers are going to move to these really high voltages.

Some will call it plusminus 400 volt or 800 volt like NVIDIA is describing, but I think the trend is clear. So the opportunity is much bigger than NVIDIA themselves, and frankly, it’s bigger than even data centers. AI starts in the cloud because that’s where a lot of this really intensive processing, learning and inference will occur, but it’s going to go from cloud to the edge, to the client. And there’s just early talk and app, but there’s so much more to happen as AI goes into your car for true complete self driving and learning, goes into all of your mobile devices, goes into medical devices, goes into robotics. I mean, AI is really just at the very beginning, starting in the cloud.

And wherever AI goes, not only goes massive processing, but massive processing power, which is a great opportunity for, again, gallium nitrate and silicon carbide to follow those chips. So there’s a lot to do, but right now, I think data center will keep us very busy for the next two years, NVIDIA and far beyond that. Google, Facebook, Amazon, AWS, Intel, AMD, all of them, of course, are moving in this direction, and all of them will need more powerful chips for the future data centers.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Do you see opportunities to expand your content further from what you’re showing us in this slide here at the module level or maybe some regulation shifts or anything that could be an opportunity later on to even increase that one stop shop solution?

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Yes. It’s a good it’s actually a really good point. I spent a lot of time talking about gallium nitride and silicon carbide. These are the powerful power chips that are kind of the heart and the muscle, if you will, of these power systems. We also do silicon controllers, which are like the brains.

And when you switch to gallium nitride and silicon carbide, you want to switch a lot faster, as we talked about at the beginning. A lot of things in that power system have to change. So we’ve gotten very good at the brains, which need to think faster, not like AI GPUs, but the brains of a power supply called a silicon usually done in silicon, not in gallium nitrate or silicon carbide. So we’re doing silicon controllers. We’re doing isolated drivers.

It’s another thing that we do in silicon that you can’t yet today do in gallium nitrate and silicon carbide. So there are adjacent chips, complementary chips, are very important to these systems that we’re also doing to enable the full system. It also increases our content. We sell it as more of a chipset. But as you also implied, Tristan, there’s the chance for some of these to be and I’m sitting right in front of the picture for everyone to see Some of these could become modules themselves.

So each of these blocks are a power system. They could be designed as a power module, which has the gallium nitride, the controller, the isolators, the magnetics, which we’re good at designing high frequency magnetics. So there’s potential even for Navitas to move into power modules that would increase our content dramatically. We’re not making any announcements yet on that plan, but certainly that potential is there. MPS is a great example of a company that’s a silicon controller company, doesn’t do the gallium nitride and silicon carbon today, but they’ve transitioned from selling the chips to also selling power modules in this traditional 12 volt and 48 volt market.

So it’s one example of somebody of great financial success that’s operating at the module level, and that could be a path for Navitas over time.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: One last question on my side at least about data center. Where do you think the highest mode, competitive mode in IP is? I mean, obviously, you’re ahead of the competition with what you’re doing here. The module and the silicon controller is What is the IP behind it? And what type of value are you adding eventually if you were to move in that segment as well?

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Yes. I think the gallium nitride, the fundamental advantage we bring comes back to even the early beginning of the company, not just GaN transistors, great, fast and efficient transistors, but GaN integrated circuits. Not only are we now integrating the driver, like I said at the very beginning, which is what really helped to catapult not only the company but the industry to bring GaN into its first mainstream markets. Now we’ve gone multiple we’re on our fourth generation, going to fifth generation, which includes higher integration, integrating drive, control functions, sensing functions, protection circuits, The latest GaN technology that we use here, generation four, is called GAN SAFE for high reliability applications, including data centers, because it integrates not only drive and sensing functions, but protection functions to make the most safe, protected and reliable GaN IC. Of course, data centers and applications like this are expected to last ten to twenty years.

So that GaN safe technology, that GaN integrated technology is not only getting us the best performance, high integration for a small chip size within the system, but also the highest reliability. So in a nutshell, for GaN, we continue to have the highest integrated GaN IC, which gives us performance, reliability and even system cost benefits over 200 patents protecting that GaN IC position. In the world of silicon carbide, Navitas and others are all discretes. It’s a vertical structure, so it’s not easy to create the integration that we did in GaN, but we have set the industry benchmark for the highest voltage and the highest reliability. And the highest voltage, of course, plays perfectly into hooking up into this very high voltage grid, 13.8 kV.

Now our silicon carbide chips are the highest voltage today in the market at 6.5 kV. That’s not 13.8, but you take 6.5 and you stack them, and you can manage that high voltage stepping it all the way down to 800 volts. Compare that to most silicon carbide competitors in the world, they have 1.2 kV, maybe 1.7 kV. We’re doing two kV, three kV, four kV, up to six kV. So ultra high voltage, ultra high reliability is our silicon carbide advantage, ultra high integration driving performance, size and reliability benefits, and GaN is our big GaN advantage.

It’s interesting. Kind of the biggest the leader in power semiconductors overall when you include silicon is Infineon. In fact, Infineon bought international rectifier, which is where I and many of the founders started. So I would still I would point to Infineon as the biggest competitor. They have the silicon, so they do a lot in the 12 volt, and then they have low voltage and high voltage GaN, and they have the silicon carbide.

So that could be the most feared competitor, if you will. But here’s an interesting twist. We signed a cross license, a broad cross licensing agreement for gallium nitride and a covenant not to sue for the rest of our patent portfolio, which includes silicon carbide, with Infinion. And at first glance, you might say, well, that’s a little strange. Why would you do it?

Well, what we’re finding is most really high volume applications really want to go to gallium nitride and silicon carbide, but they really don’t want to do it with a sole source solution, especially in early stage company like Navitas, inherent risk profile. So we find Infineon to be actually one of the closest in terms of technology capability and broad range, as I described, to address this market. So we’re turning a competitive threat into, I think, a collaborative opportunity. And it was, frankly, one of the reasons why NVIDIA announced Infineon and Navitas as part of this collaboration because they love the dual searching nature just for the reason you described. The 48 volt GaN, they want to go big with a lot of GaN inside that box.

They don’t want to do it with a sole source approach. Now that Tus and Infineon have this cross licensing, we’re proactively setting up common footprints, common specs to make dual sourcing easy for our customers. MACOM? MACOM can be confusing. MACOM is a leader in gallium nitride for RF, but gallium nitride for power is although the materials are the same, the application knowledge, the device structures, the technologist skill set is actually quite different.

So we don’t see and we we will not be going into RF just like the RF guys, even Corvo looked at going again or or silicon carbide in the power field, ultimately sold that business off. So I think RF and power don’t always mix too well, so we’ll keep that separate. But MPS is a good one. MPS doesn’t have gallium nitride or silicon carbide in house, so they actually partner with people because they’re making the modules. The modules need their controllers, and MPS has great silicon controllers, but then they want to have the gallium nitride inside that module, that could actually be another partnership opportunity for Navitas.

Yes. This is a it’s a great question, and it’s a common ecosystem situation where typically, even in the charger space, we’re selling to the guys who design and manufacture chargers or adapters, names you wouldn’t tend to know, but those are the suppliers to the Apples and HPs and Dells and Lenovos of the world. So it’s very common for us to form the relationship with the major OEMs or the end system integrators because we need to know what’s the future coming. What power level does Google want to drive their new phones or Apple want or whatever. What are those power requirements coming And then make sure we work with our suppliers that our chips and our system, our applications engineers can enable it.

So we’re following that same model with NVIDIA. Right? And we don’t sell anything directly to NVIDIA at this time. That could change as they move in this direction. But we talk to them because they’re teaching us what’s the power requirements for the roadmap, so we can get ready and work with their suppliers.

So it’s always a three way relationship in all of our markets and data centers the same.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: And who are those integrators?

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Well, the power supply guys are again companies you might not know, but they tend to be in Asia, Lite On, Delta, Acbel, Compuware, Chaconi, Flex has a strong power capability, Advanced Energy, those are mostly our companies that are our customers that are buying the chips, making the power supplies and then reselling to the hyperscalers, AWS, etcetera.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: By a few figures of merit, I think GaN is the better material. So if you can continue to bring it to higher voltages, do you need the SiC business in the long run?

Gene Sheridan, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Navitas: Yes, because what’s happening is as much as we’re going to push GaN to higher voltages, it’s a lateral structure. So you’re definitely hitting limits. As you try to handle high voltages, lateral means the current and voltage is being blocked along the surface of the chip, the wafer, which is how almost all silicon semiconductors are done. But if you really want high power and high voltage, we tend to flip that around and make it a vertical structure where you’re blocking the voltage across from the top to the bottom. That gives you a lot more dimension to work with to block that voltage.

So ultimately, GaN will never be as high voltage as silicon carbide. Even as GaN moves to high voltages, like maybe you can get to 1,000 volts or 1.5 kilovolts, silicon carbide is popular today for 1,000 volts or 1.5, but look where it’s going. We’re going to three kilowatt, four kilowatt, five kilowatt, six kilowatt. Why not 10 kilowatt? Why not 15 kilowatt?

We need to upgrade the entire world’s grid. And by the way, this is not just how you power data centers, it’s how you hook up solar farms, wind farms, energy storage. The entire world’s grid needs to get upgraded and solid state transformers replacing that big magnetic transformer has no power semiconductors in it. That’s what the grid is today. Over time, it will all go I wrote down SST because that’s solid state transformer.

That just means semiconductor based transformer. That’s going to be silicon carbide. That’s the best way to handle it. So I think as GaN goes up in voltage, so does silicon carbide. And silicon carbide will always be better at really high voltages because of its vertical nature rather than lateral nature.

Tristan Gerass, Senior Semiconductor Analyst, Baird: Thanks. I think we’re running out of time, but I invite you to Gene is available for one on ones, or please reach us, and we can certainly set up calls to discuss further the company.

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