Odyssey Semiconductor, Inc was founded in 2019 by Rick Brown and James R. Shealy, in Ithaca, NY with the aim of replacing silicon carbide with gallium nitride as the dominant high-performance power switching semiconductor material of choice.
The material properties of gallium nitride (GaN) make it a far superior choice to silicon carbide (SiC) for power switching applications. To date however, GaN processing technology has not been able to realize a viable GaN high voltage switching transistor operating above 1000 V. Current designs have been horizontal conduction devices based on radio frequency (RF) designs modified to operate at high voltage. These designs, however, do not scale well beyond the 1000 V operating voltage, which limits their use to low voltage, consumer electronics applications.
Odyssey Semiconductor’s unique GaN processing technology allows for the realization of vertical current conduction GaN devices which extends application voltages from 1000 V to over 10,000 V, allowing GaN devices to break out of the consumer electronics application space and into more demanding roles such as electric vehicles, industrial motor control, and energy grid applications.