What role does Ideal Power play in the automotive industry and how do your products stand out in the market?
Ideal Power is using innovative technologies to build semiconductors that can improve the performance of EV drivetrains, onboard chargers and circuit protection. In addition to these applications, our solutions are also a fit for charging systems, renewable energy, energy storage and UPS systems for data centers. Cost and range anxiety are the two main impediments to EV mass adoption. Our technology can address both of these issues by improving EV range by 8% to 10% and providing a lower cost silicon alternative to silicon carbide devices. This is particularly important as semiconductors are the second most expensive component (up to 10% of the total car value) of an EV.
What are some partnerships that you are particularly proud of and how is the demand like, nowadays?
Tesla brought EVs to the state where they are becoming more broadly accepted and, as a result, traditional automakers have come to the realization that they need to differentiate themselves. This shift in perspective is drawing them to start to collaborate with us and, thus, we are now working on the drivetrain for the EV platform of a major global automaker. Recently, we also announced a collaboration with a Tier 1 auto supplier and we are seeing serious interest coming from large companies that want to evaluate our technology for their own applications. The feedback that we receive as a result of these collaborations helps us further improve our products, and as more and more major players start working with us, their peers also get interested in our solutions.
What are the main challenges you have to solve in order for Ideal Power to succeed in the coming years?
The size of many electronics is driven by the efficiency of the semiconductors and their resulting waste heat. To take full advantage of any new semiconductor technology, companies need to design it into their products. Since we are just now commercializing our products, our focus is on bringing the technical community up to speed on the technology and driving adoption. The key to that is finding talent. While this is tough nowadays, given that our technology brings a new and innovative architecture to the power semiconductor space many talented professionals are enticed by the opportunity to work with us.
A broader challenge is that, at times, policy tries to pick winners in technology rather than letting the marketplace decide, and, consequently, there is a possibility to have significant misallocation of capital. Hopefully, by seeking industry input on the best way to use government funding, the CHIPS Act will get the most bang for the taxpayers’ buck when it comes to technology development and market formation.
As the auto market evolves to other propulsion technologies, do you envision a potential expansion of your technologies?
Our attempt is to keep the team relatively small and to leverage the huge investment that has already been made in the semiconductor industry.
Rather than build everything ourselves, we would prefer to provide other players with our technology, so they can further add it to their offerings. We aim to continue to improve and evolve the core technology by either getting direct funding or collaborating with other companies in the attempt to produce U.S. made devices.
Besides batteries, other alternative propulsion systems (e.g., hydrogen fuel cells) can represent opportunities for our further expansion. Semiconductors that change the voltage and switch from DC to AC and vice-versa, are vital in all applications that work with energy sources. By leveraging the existing semiconductor infrastructure, we can build and commercialize our products without the need for capital investment in specialized equipment.
Where do you see Ideal Power in ten years from now?
As we get more customers adopting our technology, both in the automotive industry and industrial applications like renewable energy, we see opportunities to license our technology to other semiconductor companies. Our objective is to improve a wide variety of applications and continue to grow as a technology company with a focus on advancing the technology, including the adoption of wide-band gap materials as their cost and quality improves. Doing so will allow us to continue to nurture our company culture that is based around the uncompromising quality of the people that make up our team.
