Amantys, the Gate driver innovator ran out of business

Amantys, the UK based Gate driver manufacturer ran out of business on March 2^nd this year.

Amantys was a highly innovative company developing a new type of power module gate drivers for 1200V to 3.3kV power modules from Infineon or Fuji electric. Gate drivers are the PCB and devices that helps driving the IGBTs, which require a specific amount of current to be correctly triggered.

The initial idea was to harness the possibilities offered by digital control of power modules. They were in competition with AgileSwitch which partnered with Methode, Fuji electric and SBE to go up in the food-chain and deliver powerstacks.

They were manufacturing and selling Gate drivers for power modules in direct competition with CT-concept (acquired by Power Integrations in 2012), which olds more than 60% share of the Gate drivers open market. Their R&D department was, on the other side, actively developing drivers for Wide Band Gap semiconductor.

They were working hand in hand with the main Gallium nitride (GaN) and Silicon Carbide (SiC) power device companies and especially start-up companies. They produced IP and patents together with a high knowledge about driving wide band gap semiconductors.

They could not manage to survive until these devices began to be widely used. Today’s GaN and SiC markets are just taking off. GaN devices require specific drivers as they are normally on devices in a Cascode assembly, or Normally-off devices called Gate Injection Transistor as developed by Panasonic.