(techno music)
This may well be the future of electronics.
It's a charger that's a little bit…
smaller than other chargers.
Okay, this isn't the future,
but the fact that it's a little bit smaller
may be a sign of things to come.
And it's all thanks to a special material hidden inside.
So, let's get in there.
(rustling)
I don't know if this is going to help us.
I say we use the hammer.
(light airy music)
(banging)
Now it cracked. Okay,
we're getting somewhere.
(banging)
Boom.
Look at that.
The material we're after is called gallium nitride, or GaN.
It's a super effective semiconductor.
Some materials, like copper,
are very good at conducting electricity,
while materials like glass are not.
Semiconductors are about halfway between those two extremes,
which makes them really versatile for different products.
That means GaN stands to replace the material
that currently rules the electronics industry: silicon.
Gallium nitride can pave the way
for a whole new generation of miniaturized tech.
And it can make that charger even smaller.
So it will get to the point
where you just have a cable
going straight from the outlet in your laptop.
And this, you need basically this gallium nitride
electronics to make that happen.
That's Martin Kuball.
He's a professor at the University of Bristol
in the United Kingdom.
He's an expert on gallium nitride,
and he has bigger dreams than material of the chargers.
Better solar cells, more efficient power transmission,
there's a lot up for grabs.
Electric cars, which only use gallium nitride,
and that makes it much more efficient than current cars,
so they would have a longer range to drive.
What we're tearing apart right now
is a charger from Anchor called the PowerPort Atom PD 1.
It's one of the early mass-produced
gadgets to use GaN semiconductors.
It's not super visible,
but hidden inside this chip is gallium nitride.
It's responsible for managing the power use
and energy consumption of the device.
Now, you might be familiar with the element gallium.
YouTube loves it. There are a million videos
dedicated to playing with it,
and it is a lot of fun.
Its melting point is around 86 degrees Fahrenheit,
which means just your body heat alone
is enough to turn it into a liquid.
But as the silicon of the future,
gallium isn't really that exciting
until you combine it with nitrogen.
I mean, they use some gases, which contain gallium.
You have some gases, which contain nitrogen.
And you basically flow them across a hot surface,
and these gases react chemically.
And then you form very tiny, thin layers of this material.
There may be 1/100ths of a human hair thickness,
so they're very, very small but very, very powerful.
Martin says he's been following
gallium nitride tech for 15 or 20 years.
And in that time, it's popped up in a few common places.
The major market is in LEDs and lasers.
Blu-ray DVD players actually uses GaN lasers
to read discs and get that super high resolution.
And some labs are using tiny GaN lasers
to improve microscopes.
But semiconductors are where gallium nitride
will really take off.
The key is that GaN edges out silicon
when it comes to efficiency.
You lose maybe only 1 percent of the energy
you're basically trying to convert,
whereas if you take a silicon device, you lose 3 percent.
That doesn't sound like a lot,
but when you consider just how much
silicon we use in everything, it adds up.
If you look at gallium nitride electronics,
it's slightly more expensive than silicon,
not dramatically more expensive.
But if you build the whole system using gallium nitride
it’s actually much, much cheaper than using silicon,
and better performance.
There's the sustainability angle, too.
Losing less energy means saving power.
One estimate we found says that if we replaced
all of our silicon electronics with GaN today,
we'd save 10 percent of electricity consumption in the US.
And that's really exciting, but remember:
the immediate future of gallium nitride
looks more like this little charger that I just destroyed.
It's not gallium's fault.
We know it works, and it works really well.
But the problem is systemic.
Silicon is cheap, it's ubiquitous, we're used to it,
and the entire electronics industry is built on it.
Gallium nitride has researchers like Martin sold.
It just has to do the same thing for Silicon Valley.
The main obstacle for widespread adoption
is basically people just need to get used to it.
It's a different component.
You wouldn't take your normal circuit you put in there.
You have a silicon component in there.
You would normally not just take a gallium nitride
component in there and replace that silicon component.
So you have to replace or optimize
the whole electronics around it.
People tend to be conservative.
They know it works, and they have to start rebuilding
the circuits a little bit to take full advantage of this.
That's happening right now, but that takes some time.
Right now, creating gallium nitride is expensive.
You often have to use a lot of pressure
or get very high temperatures to grow GaN crystals.
And the growing process can lead to a lot of defects,
which means you need even more
to get enough of the useful stuff.
Some people are trying to grow
gallium nitride on top of silicon,
so we can use the platforms we already have.
But even that still takes some special apparatuses.
So for now, the industry will have to juggle
multiple kinds of semiconductors.
Gallium nitride, in some applications,
will be better than silicon.
In some other applications, silicon will be better.
There's another material called silicon carbide that
has also benefits and drawbacks,
or gallium oxide, vice versa.
So it's a whole space you have to explore.
It'll be a little while before
gallium nitride takes over the world.
But the market does seem to be growing.
Anker announced three new chargers
with different specs that will all feature gallium nitride.
And the company says there are more on the way.
Meanwhile, RavPower has also made a gallium nitride charger.
So, be patient.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to fix this one.
Hey, everyone. Thanks so much for watching.
If you want to check out another video on materials,
be sure to check out our ferrofluid video.
I think you'll enjoy that a lot.
(laughter)
(beeping)
Oh, no, no!
(beeping)
Check out another— (crashing)
Ah!
(beeping)