From the earnings call transcript, they do seem to allude to a significant breakthrough. I think they were just being their prudent, humble selves by not trumpeting the B-TRAN too much.
Bit indeed they seem to have thrown the gauntlet down with this white paper.
"The application to our PPSA technology is unique, but the concept of bi-directional IGBTs has been known in the power conversion industry for many years. Our bi-directional IGBTs offer significant efficiency and power density improvements for our PPSA technology, the potential for patent coverage is likely limited to only the manufacturing processes. During the course of our bi-directional IGBT R&D efforts we’ve come up with the significant development that provides an alternative to accomplishing bi-directional switching. The new bi-directional switch concept which we’re telling the bi-directional, bi-polar junction transistor or BTRAN for short, has the potential to meet or exceed the projected performance of the bi-directional IGBT. The projected performance of the BTRAN has now been validated to third-party stimulations. During the second quarter, the U.S. patent offers ideal power five new patents on our BTRAN bi-directional switching concept with several additional U.S. and international patents pending.
The recently issued patents cover the operation, control and manufacturing of BTRAN device. It is our hope that if the BTRAN performs as expected it could become a potential replacement for the conventional IGBTs we use in our PPSA technology and the bi-directional IGBTs we’re developing and as a result would add a significant power semi-conductor invention to our intellectual property portfolio. At this point in time our primary technology path for bi-directional switching remains bi-directional IGBT, but the BTRAN device if successful would give us an option with potentially higher performance and where Ideal Power could own the critical intellectual property regarding its operation, control and manufacturer. In order to further development and potential commercialization of the BTRAN device, with our key patents now in place we’ll be engaging in additional semiconductor fabricator to focus on developing the manufacturing processes and proof-of-concept of the BTRAN device. We’ll providing more detail on our BTRAN development and proof-of-concept efforts in the coming quarters.
In the interim we’ll continue to develop the bi-directional IGBT as our primary approach to increase our efficiency and power density of our next generation PPSA technology. The addition of the BTRAN patents now brings our total issued patents to 30 with over 100 patents still pending the cover of broad range of technologies, advances, production techniques, control algorithms and applications of our technology. We’ll keep you apprised of our progress on both the bi-directional IGBT and the BTRAN switch development activities in future calls."
