New CEO to lead Wise Integration’s global growth

Ghislain Kaiser, the recently appointed Chief Executive Officer of
Wise Integration, explains how his main task is to transition the company from a CEA Leti spinout into a pioneering force in GaN and digital power management innovation with strong growth potential.

PEI: Please, can we start with a little bit of an overview of your career to date, the roles you’ve had and the work you’ve undertaken in those?

GK: I began my career at ST Microelectronics in the late ‘90s, where I had a number of technical and leadership roles, spending time on test and product engineering, design, and as a lead architect for different business units, set-up box, and the wireless business units.

So in 2006, actually, that was linked to my job at ST Microelectronics, where I was in charge of optimising the power consumption and the heat dissipation for wireless applications. I wanted to have better tools in order to do this job at the system level. And because I wasn’t able to find anything that was very suitable for this job, I decided to jump into the startup world and create my own startup to develop this new generation of system simulation tools.

So, I co-founded DOCEA Power, a French electronic design automation startup focused on full-chip power and thermal modelling. At DOCEA, our goal was to address, as I said, the increasing challenges of power consumption and thermal management in ICN platform design. And I served as CEO and led the company to become a recognised leader in this domain, resulting eventually in the acquisition by Intel in 2015.

This adventure actually also took me to relocate in the US, so from France to the US, and more specifically in the Silicon Valley, where we had our ecosystem, not only the main customers, but also the analysts, partners, and the electronic design automation ecosystem.

I stayed in the US for about nine years. First, as the DOCEA CEO, and then I moved to the Intel headquarters in Santa Clara in 2015. I stayed at Intel for about a decade, holding senior director positions, and most recently leading global engineering and customer enablement programmes worldwide, focusing on system-level power, thermal, and performance challenges using simulation across the Intel main market segments. This included consumer electronics, laptops, desktops, notebooks, data centres, and, of course, AI, because now everyone talks about AI. Intel as well, of course, as a key leader in this domain, and AI from edge devices to network to cloud. And then I joined WISE.

PEI: What were the factors which made you want to join WISE?

GK: What attracted me to WISE was a unique convergence of deep tech innovation, strong foundational work, and a talented team. WISE has developed truly differentiated technologies in gallium nitrate power devices, and also a very innovative way of controlling that digitally. That’s our differentiator.

We have a true R&D-driven culture, coupled with a clear mission to disrupt power electronics with smarter, more power-efficient systems, which is perfectly aligned with my own vision. I saw a great opportunity to help scale the company globally, not only in terms of commercial reach, but also in terms of technological leadership.

PEI: The company started life as a CEA-Leti spin-off. Your main task is to develop it into a fully commercial GAN technology, pioneering organisation?

GK: Absolutely. We started from strong foundational work within CEA-Leti, a very well-known research centre in Europe, especially for semiconductors. And now, WISE is entering a new phase in its journey. Having built this strong technology foundation since spinning out of CEA-Leti in 2020, the next step is to scale commercially, expand globally, because, as you know, we play on an international playground, and we want to establish ourselves as a leader in digitalisation of power converters. There are many things that are moving from the analogue world to digitalisation, with all the benefits of having digital control, having digital features, which leads to a more scalable application and reduces the time to market or development cycles.

PEI: In order to help develop the company, you’ll be looking at some of the key rapidly expanding markets, which include AI, data centres and the electric vehicle market. It would be good to have your thoughts as to the opportunities there are there in some of these rapidly developing markets?

GK: We had our first successes with WISE in the consumer market, starting with applications below 500 watts for TVs, and notebook and smartphone chargers. Now that we are improving our roadmaps, that we are able to address higher power levels, we are expanding into AI data centres and AI servers - it’s definitely a growing market. There are a lot of opportunities these days because we have some worldwide key leaders like NVIDIA that are pushing the transition from silicon to wide bandgap devices like gallium nitrate and silicon carbide. And we are at the right time to be a leader in this transformation. So that’s exactly why we are positioning ourselves on our roadmaps to address this emerging AI data centre market.

But there is also the automotive innovation market that is going through this same transformation. These two markets are definitely our future for growth opportunities. We know that those markets are very challenging, and we will not go alone. We will go with partners, in order to scale from an industrial point of view to address these very demanding markets.

And maybe last, but not least, this is also all the experience that I obtained at Intel in the data centre.

PEI: In terms of the technology offering from WISE Integration, what are the USPs you have developed so far that make the solutions attractive to the market? And are you able to outline the roadmap as to how the technology may be developed - new solutions over time? What you can share on the technology side?

GK: On the technology side, we have built two main platforms. One is WiseGan, a family of high efficiency, gallium nitrate power transistors. And the second one is WiseWare, our proprietary digital control solution using software, firmware, running on a microcontroller. This is the digital path, the digital control that I was talking about.

Together, these two solutions form a unique gallium nitride plus digital combination that enables high frequency operation for gallium nitride.

Switching the transistor at high frequency, a higher frequency than we have today with the existing solutions. We also use the digital control to enable what we call soft switching, zero voltage switching, which are key features to develop a more compact and more power-efficient design while reducing the overall cost of these power converters applications.

I already gave a few examples of these - notebooks, smartphone chargers, AI server power supplies, rack power shelves in data centres, and also onboard chargers for electrical vehicles. All of these applications will benefit from either more compact capabilities or higher power efficiency (or both), meaning that we keep the volume the same, but we can put more power into the same volume.

A clear example of a benefit for an electrical vehicle is that if you have more power efficiency, it means that you can charge your vehicle with more power, so reducing the overall power charging timing.

So, these are all the benefits that we bring with this combination of GaN, power switch, smart power device and our power control using software running on an MCU.

PEI: In terms of the future, will you be further refining those solutions, or are there other solutions that are on the drawing board or in development? You possibly don’t want to reveal too much, is there anything you can tell us as to what else you think the company is looking at?

GK: Let me talk a little bit about our roadmap. It’s driven by three customer benefits. One is improving compactness and power efficiency for power converters. To see how we can reduce the existing components, how we can remove some analogue parts on the existing power converters in order to improve the compactness. We have some innovative patented new topologies that help reduce this volume for the same power or increase the power efficiency for the same volume.

Second is reducing overall cost for power converters. It’s not only having more power in the same volume or more compact application, it’s also doing all of that, this benefit, while reducing the overall cost. And third is enabling scalability and additional high-value features, thanks to what we call the software-defined approach.

Because as you have understood, with our digital approach, we have a microcontroller which is running software. And with software, you have more flexibility than hardware to add features and also reduce the cycle to develop differentiated products - because of this flexibility of the software. All of this is made possible through our proprietary digital control, our system expertise for integrated solutions, and innovative architectures or topologies.

I can give you a few examples by way of illustration. We are developing systems in package solutions that combine a discrete gallium nitrate power switch with custom analogue digital ASICs for smarter integration. And as we integrate more components into this system in package, we also reduce the cost of materials.

On the control side, our next-gen WiseWare controllers will support higher power interleaved multi-phase architectures to support higher power requirements and will embed intelligent algorithms for adaptive control and fault detection. And fault detection is one of the digital features I mentioned earlier, that can be very useful in data centres for preventive maintenance. I can imagine that in the future we will add some AI algorithm in order to manage this type of new requirements in data centres or in other applications.

PEI: Alongside the technology focus which you’ve outlined, are there plans to develop the company in terms of partnerships, whether it’s existing ones expanding or forming new ones and/or by adding personnel. Please give us, if you can, an idea of how the infrastructure of the company is going to be built out?

GK: In order to address these new markets and to support these growth opportunities, we are expanding our global infrastructure. We have a design centre in Canada, Sales and Technical support subsidiaries in Asia - Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, because there are a lot of customers, opportunities and partners in Asia in the power electronics domain.

We are also building strategic partnerships, and we are strengthening our internal talent to support our growth objectives. As an example, we have a strong partnership with well-known research centres in Europe, like imec and CEA-Leti. We have also developed strong partnerships with all the ecosystem players, including IDMs, OEMs and distributors.

PEI: In terms of what you’ve outlined for the future, do you see any particular challenges that you have to address, or is it mainly just some great opportunities for the company going forward?

GK: There are always challenges, unfortunately, and especially these days, for a startup that plays in an international semiconductor playground. As you know, we have seen in the past five years that semiconductors have become a high-stakes topic subject to geopolitics. Competition is global, with competition with startups and established companies all over the world.

All of this is part of the challenges for any semiconductor startup these days. Our opportunity, though, is to leverage our agility and differentiated technology to create trust, because as we are a newcomer, we need to create trust, and position ourselves on the path to becoming a leader in the power electronics domain. We think that we have strong, very solid technology and differentiated products that will help us overcome these barriers and get on the path to growth.

PEI: In terms of how you measure the success of the plans that you have in place, do you have any have specific objectives and timelines for achieving them, or is it a more relaxed approach that you know what you want to do, but there’s no particular pressures to achieve certain things by a certain time? What does success look like over the next couple of years?

GK: In the next two years, my main objectives with Wise will be, one, to establish the company as a leader in digital control for wide bandgap power electronics. If you notice here, I didn’t say just gallium nitrate, but I said wide bandgap because our digital control is not specific to gallium nitrate. We can also use digital control for silicon carbide. We don’t think that we are limited to one specific material, but we have opportunities to expand and address different stages of power levels, power requirements, thanks to our digital control approach. Two is to drive innovation to increase customer value and expand into key markets - data centres, AI, and automotives. That’s definitely a second, big objective. And this will require scalability. It will require partnerships in order to grow and address these very demanding markets and customers with the right integration.

Third is that, in order to do this, we need to build a resilient and high-performing organisation. We already have a very strong, talented team. We will continue to expand this team in Europe, Asia, and North America, because you know that at the end of the day, what matters and makes the difference is not only the technology, but also the team behind the technology.

And fourth is our objective to focus on sustainable growth and customer success. We have to put in place a solid discipline in order to have flawless execution and to establish strong relationships and to develop quality and differentiated products to ensure this growth and customer success. These are the four objectives that I have in mind for the next couple of years.

PEI: Any final thoughts as to your new role at Wise Integration and/or how you see the company’s place in the power electronics industry into the future?

GK: I’m excited to lead Wise Integration at a pivotal moment. The industry is moving toward more intelligent and energy-conscious systems. The gallium nitrate and digital combination that we put in our products is exactly what is needed in order to address these industrial challenges.

For me, this road is more than leadership. It’s about powering the innovation of tomorrow while contributing to the global energy transition. Why the innovation of tomorrow? Because you know that with AI and all the AI workloads that we need to support in the future, we will need to have massive computers available. And all of that, the GPUs and CPUs, will consume tonnes of power, and this requires innovative solutions like the product developed by Wise, in order to have sustainable growth.

It will be the same with electrical vehicles, this is also part of this energy conscious transition. We are very happy at Wise to contribute to a better future. This is what’s driving our team, why people wake up every morning with this motivation, because they feel that at Wise they contribute to something that is big and absolutely required, very urgent for the future world.

Ghislain Kaiser, Chief Executive Officer of Wise Integration