Odyssey Semiconductor Technologies, Inc.
A power semiconductor company using Gallium Nitride to create breakthrough technology for high performance and high volume power applications
Odyssey Semiconductor was founded by Rick Brown and James R. Shealy. Our disruptive proprietary technology will enable gallium nitride (GaN) to displace silicon carbide (SiC) as the emerging high-voltage power-switching semiconductor material of choice.
Innovating the Future
We believe the GaN is the future of high-voltage transistors. The material properties of GaN make it a far superior option over silicon carbide (SiC) for high-voltage power-switching applications. However, GaN processing technology has not produced a viable GaN high voltage switching transistor operating above 1,000 V. Current devices are largely horizontal conduction devices based on radio frequency (RF) designs modified to operate at high voltage. These designs are not scalable beyond 1,000 V for operating voltage, which limits their use to low-voltage consumer electronics applications.
Odyssey Semiconductor’s unique GaN processing technology allows for the realization of vertical current conduction GaN devices which extends application voltages from 1,000 V to over 10,000 V, allowing GaN power switching devices to extend well beyond the consumer electronics application space and into more demanding applications such as electric vehicles, industrial motor control, and energy grid applications.
Focus Industries
Industrial Motors
With over 40% of global energy consumed by electric motors, there is a pressing need for more efficient and smaller power circuits. Vertical GaN enables designers to meet these needs.
Electric Vehicles
To expand the adoption of electric vehicles, there is a need to extend range while also reducing total solution cost. Silicon FETs do not provide enough efficiency and silicon carbide FETs are too expensive. Vertical GaN is the answer.
Renewable Energy
Generating and distributing energy from renewable sources has created new applications for power conversion. The need to operate at high-voltages and high efficiency presents unique challenges that vertical GaN is best to solve.
Our Headquarters
Odyssey Semiconductor’s global headquarters supports R&D, wafer fabrication and corporate functions. Located in Ithaca, NY, the 10,000 sqft facility includes multiple cleanrooms with photolithography and other semiconductor manufacturing process equipment, an advanced metrology lab and a power applications lab. Additional spaces for R&D and corporate functions are also included. The facility is optimally designed to support all aspects of vertical GaN power switch development and fabrication.
Additionally, Odyssey uses the facility to offer a unique breadth of semiconductor foundry services by filling the gap between university and large-scale wafer foundries. In addition to GaN, our foundry is capable of designing and optimizing processes in many compound semiconductor materials and substrate dimensions.
Our Team
Odyssey Semiconductor’s management team and board of directors consist of highly respected professionals in the semiconductor industry and academia. The management team alone has over 90 years of combined experience in the industry.
Management Team
Board of Directors
Management Team
Rick Brown
CTO, Co-Founder
Rick Brown is the CTO and co-founder of Odyssey Semiconductor, Inc. He has 19 years of experience in the design and fabrication of semiconductor devices, mainly specializing in gallium nitride and related materials. Prior to Odyssey Semiconductor, he was a visiting scientist at Cornell University where he worked on developing gallium nitride-based transistors for radio frequency communications applications and also was a founding member and device scientist at Avogy, Inc. (a Khosla Ventures company). Rick holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.
James Shealy
Co-Founder
After earning his doctorate, James Shealy held a dual appointment at Cornell as a research associate and at General Electric as a principal staff scientist. He joined the faculty in 1987 and is active in developing Cornell’s laboratory research in compound semiconductor materials and related graduate courses. Prior to Odyssey Semiconductor, he has served as a founding member of both Akoustis Technologies (AKTS) and RF Nitro Communications, which was acquired by RF Micro Devices (RFMD). James holds a B.S. from NC State University, an M.S. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University.
Board of Directors
John Edmunds
Chairman of the Board
Mr. Edmunds has over 40 years of financial experience and 20 years as a public company CFO with Small Cap semiconductor companies. He was most recently the Chief Financial Officer of Inphi Corporation for 13 years including an IPO. Prior to that had been the CFO of Trident Microsystems and CFO of Oak Technology. He was a graduate of UC Berkeley and formerly a CPA for 6 years with Coopers and Lybrand after which he held various executive positions with Tandem computers for 11 years through 1997.
Rick Brown
CTO, Co-Founder
Rick Brown is the CTO and co-founder of Odyssey Semiconductor, Inc. He has 19 years of experience in the design and fabrication of semiconductor devices, mainly specializing in gallium nitride and related materials. Prior to Odyssey Semiconductor, he was a visiting scientist at Cornell University where he worked on developing gallium nitride-based transistors for radio frequency communications applications and also was a founding member and device scientist at Avogy, Inc. (a Khosla Ventures company). Rick holds a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University.
Richard Ogawa
Director
Mr. Richard T. Ogawa has been General Counsel at Inphi Corporation, responsible for overseeing legal matters as well as corporate, intellectual property, and government affairs. Mr. Ogawa is a Registered United States Patent Attorney and a Member of the California State Bar with more than 25 years of experience specializing in technology companies. Prior to Inphi, he was a top Partner at Townsend and Townsend, a law firm focused on intellectual property. He is the founder and owner of Ogawa Professional Corporation, his law firm, focusing on ventured back start-up companies. He is General Counsel for Soraa Laser Diode, Inc., a venture funded company by Khosla Ventures, and is General Counsel for MCube, Inc. a venture-funded company by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He has also held a variety of engineering and management positions at NEC Electronics. He is a Charter Member of the Indus Entrepreneur Group (TIE) and had been a Board Member of the Asian Law Alliance, American Intellectual Property Law Association, and others. Mr. Ogawa also served as a Partner Member for Technology Group 2800 of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 1984, and a J.D. from Mc. George School of Law, University of Pacific in 1991.
Michael O. Thompson
Director
Dr. Thompson received his B.S. in Applied Physics from Cal Tech in 1979 and M.S./Ph.D. degrees in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell in 1984. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty in the Department of Materials Science at Cornell continuing his work on the interaction of materials with intense laser sources. He has co-authored over 100 journal publications, is co-inventor on 25 patents, and has founded or co-founded three startup companies. He was the recipient of the 2009 SEMI Award for technical contributions to the semiconductor industry. For the past 28 years, Dr. Thompson’s research has focused extensively on the behavior of semiconductor materials under pulsed and CW laser exposure. On the fundamental level, his group has explored limits to crystal growth under the extreme conditions of laser irradiation, including limits to metastable impurity incorporation, behavior of point defects, interface stability, explosive crystallization, and group IV heteroepitaxy. Key to this work has been the development of quantitative methods to monitor the kinetics of both melt and non-melt laser annealing of ultra-shallow junctions. In the late 1990s, he was involved in the development of melt-annealing methods to fabricate thin-film transistors on glass and flexible substrates. Over the past decade, he helped to develop the use of CW lasers for non-melt laser annealing (LSA–Laser Spike Annealing) of ultra-shallow junctions in advanced VLSI nodes. His group currently is active in exploring new applications for LSA both within and beyond the microelectronics community. Areas of research include dopant activation and deactivation in compound semiconductors (InGaAs, GaN, GaO2), thin-film amorphous oxide semiconductors (IGZO), metastable phase formation in metallic glasses and complex oxides during LSA quench, mesoscale structuring of organic and inorganic materials in the millisecond timescale, and development of novel processes for EUV and DSA lithography. He is also currently the director of the ACCESS (AFRL Cornell Center for Epitaxial Solutions) center focused on understanding fundamental materials issues in GaO2 power devices.
