What is GaN charging and why is it helpful?

The humble power adapter is tasked by its users with one thing and one thing only: to charge their devices. In years past, they’ve been ugly and bulky affairs. Not so much recently, however, as the implementation of gallium nitride or GaN continues to make wall chargers smaller and easier to carry around through our on-the-move lives. We’ve got a quick explanation of how it does that for our curious readers.

What is gallium nitride?

With apologies to all the physics professors and electrical engineers out there, here’s a crash course on the material science behind gallium nitride.

GaN is a semiconductor material. Depending on how much voltage flows to them, semiconductors can behave as either an insulator or a conductor, thus being a semiconductor. Semiconductors play a basic, crucial role in electronics when formed into transistors – tiny devices amplifying or switching electronic signals that, in tandem with thousands or even millions of others on a single chip, help execute programmed logic. The most common semiconductor material used in transistors is silicon, and you’ll find it in the form of silicon dioxide (SiO₂, also known as quartz) for metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors (MOSFETs).

But gallium nitride isn’t just any ordinary semiconductor: it belongs to a specific family of materials known as wide-bandgap semiconductors. The wide-bandgap part refers to the relatively high amount of voltage to knock a semiconductor from being an insulator to a conductor. Obversely, GaN has a lower overall resistance to conductivity than SiO₂ and, as such, does a faster and much better job at switching and retaining signals. Wide-bandgap semiconductors also can perform at higher voltages and temperatures versus conventional semiconductors – resiliencies that are prized for many purposes but are especially useful for the power brick.

What is gallium nitride’s role in a power adapter?

You’d be surprised how much goes into a modern-day power adapter. After all, it needs to be able to determine what voltage and amperage your gadget can accept, down step that mains voltage to something suitable for your device, convert the grid’s alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC), and then make sure the charge flow is consistent and reliable. For all the components packed into a few cubic inches, transistors have a large presence in the all-important power management and conversion departments. GaN’s big advantages over conventional semiconductors have become multiplicative here.

Power solution vendors like CUI tout gallium nitride’s performance in transistors as leading to better signal performance in devices with lower losses in quality and faster propagation. For accessory manufacturers, that means they’ll need fewer transistors for any given power output level. Not only that, but they may be able to size down other components as well – even the space-consuming transformer can be reduced by a fair bit. All of this allows them to sell appreciably tiny 30W cubes that can juice up your phone in an hour or laptop chargers that fit in a purse or messenger bag.

What does gallium nitride mean for me?

Simply put, the power is in shoppers’ hands. No, seriously.

Phone brands are trending away from providing a power adapter in the box. In the world of welterweight laptops with lighter power demands, some manufacturers have shipped wart-style adapters (the ones with the integrated plugs) for some devices while still supplying others with large bricks and a mess of cables. You’ve probably kept an older adapter around for years – maybe you lug it around on your travels, or maybe it’s permanently plugged in somewhere at home. Whatever the case may be, chances are you might be able to replace those old charging solutions with a new GaN adapter.

Anker

Anker 715 Nano II 65W Charger

$33.99 $49.99 Save $16

Anker’s most capable single-port USB-C phone charger is still small enough to carry around everywhere you go. 65W will juice up devices like those from Samsung that support 45W PPS.

If you need help making a purchase decision, we can recommend several USB-C wall chargers, many featuring gallium nitride technology. And if you’re worried about cost, we should note that gallium nitride didn’t come out of nowhere. Its qualities have been researched for nearly a century and were used to advance the quality of LEDs and laser diodes in the 1990s. More pertinently, over the past couple of decades, hundreds of millions of dollars of private and public investment (including ongoing US Department of Energy grants) into research have made the implementation of gallium nitride transistors easier to scale and commercially viable. Long story short, you’ll find GaN chargers for extremely reasonable prices and often with a discount on Amazon.