“When you rely heavily on semiconductors and software, a few amazing things happen. If you look at smartphones, at laptops, they continue to improve in performance over time and they don't asymptote in cost, unlike copper and iron, where they become incompressible. Copper and iron is copper and iron. I buy them by weight.”
Volts · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
David Roberts asked how much of a solid-state transformer is software and how much hardware. Belur says a device built from chips and software keeps getting cheaper and better, while a pile of copper and iron cannot; it's the same argument behind Enphase's microinverter bet.
Transcript
…we may do it using five-kilowatt building blocks, but it's just a different approach. But what you do is those two things where you run them at much higher frequencies, the transformer itself, the galvanic isolation or the transform itself, shrinks, and I can also break it down into smaller chunks.
…that's attached to, I don't know, a solar field, could you pluck it out and go attach it to a data center and just program it differently? You know what I mean? Like how much of a range does the software get you versus you have to build different physical transformers for different physical tasks?
Yeah. So, you know, again, it depends on the approach that you take. I'll give you the N-phase view of it, if you may. You know, any modern electronics today has microprocessors or microcontrollers built into it, right? That's what they rely on. And by definition, when you have a microcontroller, you can run more sophisticated control algorithms in there. And all of that is done in firmware. All of that is done in software. You're monitoring a lot of inputs, outputs, as well as all the control parameters that are in there. You can look at what happened. You can do diagnostics on one if a failure were to occur. This is the part that I was talking about, where you're adding a lot of intelligence, you're adding a lot of software. And when you make it, when you rely heavily on semiconductor and software, that's exactly what Enphase has done over its last 20 years. When you rely heavily on software and semiconductors, a few amazing things happen, right? Semiconductors and software, if you look at the technology history, if you look at smartphones, if you look at your laptops, et cetera, they continue to…
wrote a whole post about this once many years ago. I should dig it up, but this is sort of characteristic of the whole clean energy transition. A lot of what's happening in the clean energy transition is substituting intelligence, substituting computing for materials, basically. And this gets you…
Yeah. You know, transistors cost femto dollars, right? So you can add more and more compute in them. We have shown that. But there are some fundamental physics that you just cannot get around, like the thermals, right? I mean, I'll never be 100 plus percent efficient, but I can get to 98 and a…
Well, let me ask on that front, like when you start thinking about it, it's very striking that power electronics have sort of moved into everything around us in our cars, our phones. Power electronics has sort of taken over everything except the grid, which is. Striking, I think. What is your…
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