SemiSouth Labs Announces First Use of its Breakthrough Transistor in a High-Level Audio Amplifier for Consumers

STARKVILLE, Miss.--SemiSouth Laboratories, an innovator in silicon carbide (SiC) power devices, announced that its breakthrough product, a highly efficient, normally-off SiC JFET, has been adopted for the first time by a Consumer Electronics company for use in a new audiophile-quality power amplifier.

The new J2 Power Amplifier, designed by legendary audio innovator Nelson Pass for First Watt, a high-quality amplifier specialist, features SemiSouth’s SJEP120R100, a normally-off, 1200 V, 100 m-Ohm SiC Vertical Junction Field Effect Transistor (JFET). Nelson Pass is founder of First Watt and also Pass Laboratories.

SemiSouth believes this is the first SiC transistor to enter production in the audio amplifier market. The JFET has traditionally been featured in rapidly growing markets for solar inverters, and server and telecom power supplies, among others. It offers several benefits over comparable transistors, including higher system efficiencies, higher switching frequencies and lower conduction losses.

Nelson Pass remarked “These new JFETs have a very low distortion characteristic that makes them superb for use in linear amplifiers. In apples-to-apples comparisons with MOSFET-type power transistors, they can achieve 10 to 20 dB improvements in distortion performance. When a better transistor like this comes along, it can mean getting the same distortion performance with a lot less feedback, or lower distortion with the same amount of feedback. The J2 does amplifier does both, and that helps make it a better sounding amplifier than the best of its predecessors.”

With a device that behaves a little like a tube, the first critics to hear the new J2 Amplifier were “blown away by the beauty of its sound.”

According to Dr. Jeff Casady, SemiSouth’s Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Business Development, “We are really pleased and honored to be working with a designer of Nelson Pass’s caliber, and pleased he chose to use the highly linear, low-noise characteristics of our JFET in this new exciting product. It continues to show the versatility and performance of our cost-effective SiC JFET transistor technology.”

SiC is an emerging semiconductor technology enabling energy efficient operation of power conversion and power management in telecom power supplies, inverters in solar and high-frequency welding, future automotive electric vehicle platforms, and many other products. The promise of SiC is its ability to make power supplies and power inverters up to 75% more energy efficient, operate at up to eight times higher frequencies, run cooler and be physically much smaller. For example, SiC power JFETs are expected to increase the 'fuel' efficiency of hybrid electric vehicles and help make them more affordable.

About SemiSouth Laboratories, Inc.

SemiSouth, a privately owned corporation with offices in Starkville, Mississippi, focuses on SiC power devices and electronics, as well as SiC merchant epitaxy. It was formed in 2000, and has sold products globally through direct sales or distributors since 2005. In 2008, it introduced the world’s first commercial, cost-effective normally-off SiC JFET, which has enabled world-record energy efficiencies for its customer’s products. More information can be obtained from its web site (www.semisouth.com).